SAP Global Press Conference With Co-Founder Hasso Plattner (Live)
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Connie Guglielmo
SAP Co-founder Hasso Plattner announces that the company&#39;s suite of enterprise software will now run on its own HANA database. Plattner says he's enjoying the fact that rival Larry Ellison of Oracle "is not smiling" over SAP's news that its enterprise software suite will now run on SAP's own HANA database. [...]
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Plattner says he's enjoying the fact that rival Larry Ellison of Oracle "is not smiling" over SAP 's news that its enterprise software suite will now run on SAP's own HANA database. Oracle says it has no comment.

Hasso Plattner, c0-founder and chairman of software giant SAP, is overseeing a global press event to announce what the company says is "a milestone in enterprise software and a turning point for business management in a smarter, connected world with ever-growing amounts of data."

Here's a play-by-play of what's going on here at SAP's offices in Palo Alto, California at 9 a.m. "This is a great moment for all of us, but it's a special moment for me," Plattner says.

Six years ago, Plattner, who became chairman of SAP's supervisory board, said he founded a computer science institute in Pottsdam and became a professor looking at enterprise software architecture. He met with his top students and told them he wanted to "reinvent" enterprise systems.

The question asked was "14 years after SAP's R/3 software was created, what would an ERP system look like if we start from scratch? Among the requirements on the list of things that would be in these new software systems was that all active data would be in memory, leverage massively parallel computers, use design thinking methodology, OLTP and OLAP back together, instant BI, no more batch programs, live conversation, and dynamic rather than aggregate views of transactional data, with views and views on data.

They worked on this for three years - 15 PhD students, 30 master candidates. They told SAP that this new architecture was possible -- which started with building a new in-memory database. "I said if SAP cannot do this, sooner or later SAP will end," he said. The team was spread all over the world -- "I always wanted to do a distributed" project, linked by the Internet, teleconference.

Where are we today? I proposed three years ago a non-disruptive change of the suite, step-by-step, on to the new HANA system. First HANA went into non-SAP applications, replacing databases. Will now support, thanks to SQL, DB2, Oracle, MS_SQL and SAP-ASE.

"We do not abandon the current database vendors who carried us for the past 20 years (Oracle, IBM.) Customers have the choice. Thanks to the development of SQL, this is possible." Though, he says, some features not available on all those databases.

All SAP programs will go on HANA.

9:29: What does this mean for business? He says cost savings, 10 to 1,000 times faster analystics, no more batch programs, simplification, more functionality with less code.

"Businesses will have to change," because of the dramatic changes in the system, he says.

Response times will be below 3 seconds. "Why is speed so important? One reason: Mobile...This will require rethinking of the user interactions."

This is a technology release where the only change is in the database layer -- he says that means it will be non-disruptive. Next iteration will rethink user interaction.

"I'm very happy to say that I see a clear future for SAP for the next five to 10 years --actually a brilliant future." He says it's a major change and comes after the last five or so years where SAP wasn't really sure where the future was going to go.

9:33: Now up, Visha Sikka, who leads technology and innovation for SAP. "It gives us great pride to say [SAP's] business suite runs on HANA." You can find it here.

They've just passed around the press release, entitled: "SAP business suite powered by SAP HANA reinvents the real-time enterprise."

Demo now in process to show how fast data searches are on-the-fly.

"We know have the ability to rethink real-time," Sikka says. "Networks of networks of real-time data...That is the future" we see.

President of Sales Rob Enslin, linked via videoconference, is now giving the business spin for customers. He says there are more than 1,000 HANA customers as of last year.

He calls up Derek Dyer, director of SAP global services at John Deere, to talk about how they will be using HANA with their SAP implementation. He says they're more excited about the real-time aspects of analytics with HANA.

"We look at this..as a way to manage our business in a new and different way," John Deere says. That includes things like the "ability to simulate financial closing in minutes as opposed to the days and weeks it takes today."

10:05: Q&A begins.

Question: Does it mean there are two version of SAP business suite, one for HANA and one for other databases. Plattner says thanks to SQL, there's only one version. There are some tweaks that will be needed for specific databases, but SAP will provide the information to make it work. "Nobody has to stay on the current release. All customers can move forward" whether or not they use HANA. He says that SAP will be "transparent" with the database makers about how they made need to make changes to make their databases work with SAP's new business suite.

Question: If I'm a current SAP business suite customer, how do I know I should pick SAP HANA suite versus using another database? SAP 's Rob Enslin says they can do an evaluation in a rapid timeframe (24 hours) to determine how it will work for the customer.

Question: About how to make sure customers know what HANA is all about. Rob says that 1,000 internal SAP folks have been trained, as well as 1,000 partners. In addition, he says that SAP's acquisition of database maker Sybase has given it "mission critical" technology and knowledge about how the databases should work.

Question: About working with database rivals like IBM and Oracle. "We're not silly. We work professionally with these companies," Plattner says, noting that many SAP users run on IBM and Oracle databases. "On a personal note, I don't do what [Oracle CEO Larry Ellison] does. I stick to facts...I enjoy that he's not smiling. I know there's a weekly meeting [at Oracle] with the word HANA." He says Oracle will have to do something with the "freight train of HANA coming" and SAP is preparing itself for that. (Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger says the company has no comment.)

Question about new design thinking at SAP. Plattner takes this on. He says it's a recognition by SAP that "all systems have to be more end user centric. So the consumer, not the clerk working on the system, so the consumer is the person we’re finally dealing with." He says to work with them, SAP knows it has to understand what are the needs, and expectations. “So we have to be on a laptop and the response time has to be one second” or customers won’t use it.

Question: How do you convince users to adopt HANA? Plattner says it's about speed, which is the reason that people go comfortable with systems like Google. Google delivered fast answers, so even if they weren't the right one, you could retype quickly and get a new answer. Now Google helps predicts what we’re thinking as we type, he adds. So that’s why the speed is important and anything beyond 8 seconds is slow. “The faster the system is, the more we stay in tune.”

Plattner says "speed is fun" and that he was excited by the adoption of companies like John Deere. "It’s unbelievable that we could ignite the imagination of a lawn mover company." He SAP can load 20 times faster than before -- that is, bring in data from an SAP or non-SAP source into HANA.

Some questions about pricing. SAP is going to stand firm on its HANA pricing, Plattner says, and that there will be "no dumping" of anything through price cuts.

And that's it.