You’ll need 98 minutes (and probably some coffee) to view it, it explains how & why:
Asok Mukherjee
![Asok Mukherjee]()
Asok Mukherjee
Primarily a Re-Org expert. Besides, In SAP Practice (COE) for over 2.5 decades with more than 3 decades of total experience. Core competencies: Program & Delivery Management, SAP FICO
- Ten years ago SAP needed to overcome complexity and cost to find a way to pull ahead and stay ahead of the market
- The strategic answer was to simplify everything we do, and in so becoming more agile and productive, that way we would be able to out-innovate our competition
- Hasso Plattner, our chairman, kicked-off a project of pure research (having founded his own university) to see if we could invent the enterprise system of the future
- The researchers succeeded. They found a simpler and more elegant way to build enterprise systems
- Over twenty major techniques, new and modified, were needed. Interestingly only one was about using memory rather than disks, there was much more to it than that
- Exploiting modern microchip features, that appeared from about 2005 onward, was key – this could yield speed improvements of 100,000 times(sic) or more
- The dramatic speed increase eliminated the need for aggregates and indexes in applications, other research told us these caused 60-95% or more of application complexity – a massive simplification. Speedup is so great that even after dynamically producing aggregates on the fly there is still plenty of performance spare to be hundreds or thousands of times faster than traditional systems
- But this had to be based on column stores, notoriously difficult to update, so they invented a unique technique – suitable for running thousands or millions of transactions per second
- Thus Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) became possible, with both types of processing being done on the same single copy of the data, which allows for huge landscape simplification. Operational reporting can now return to the operational systems with large systems savings and the agility of reporting on real time operational data.
- The speedup also benefited text processing, spatial processing, planning, predictive, and graph processing, all could be mixed together at will, in-memory, and in-parallel. This allowed for greater agility and productivity, not just through the speed of execution but by having all these techniques at your fingertips ready to be used and combined.
- The SAP Development organisation, working 24/7 ‘following the sun’ in multiple centres around the world expanded the research out into today’s fully featured HANA Platform
- This work produced an enterprise system that is fundamentally simpler, and that enables high productivity, much greater agility, higher performance and lower TCO.