Ever since Shakespeare’s young Prince of Denmark confronted his father’s ghost on a “platform” in Hamlet that remarkable word has enjoyed a rich etymological history, elucidating everything from nautical and military contexts to geology and politics. While flexible enough to be relevant in diverse fields, it’s precise enough to bring clarity to a particular item or concept.
In computing, for example, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary includes separate definitions for both hardware platform and software platform. These terms evolved as IT managers used them to describe their preferred compute environments such as Windows and Intel, HP-UX and Itanium, or Solaris and SPARC. SAP has always been agnostic as far as CPU and operating system platforms are concerned, permitting customers to dictate their landscape of constituent pieces. We still are. Compute platforms are only relevant to us (and our users, I’d argue) because they contain the diverse data sets our customers use to run their businesses. If data were, say, bread, SAP would be the world’s greatest and most successful baker.
Sophisticated IT executives have begun to adopt a new real-time and data-centric view of their compute environments. They’re less concerned about underlying server specifications or OS versions and have become single-minded in devising strategies for business data. They’re looking for a data platform that thrives in our new business climate where instant answers are sought from vast amounts of diverse data that pour into an organization every second.
SAP’s Real Time Data Platform (RTDP) is the first comprehensive approach to ingesting, managing, distributing, and securing enterprise information that is data-centric from top to bottom. It is a truly modern technology platform to solve IT’s most challenging business problems. With the SAP HANA in-memory database at the heart of the RTDP, IT managers finally now have an inclusive data platform that offers an end-to-end solution for today’s data-driven business, delivered in a non-disruptive manner.
That’s a bold statement. One worth repeating: SAP RTDP is an all-data inclusive and end-to-end platform delivered in a non-disruptive manner.
Historically, innovative, advanced technologies, like HANA, are often disruptive. However, SAP RTDP is architected as a data platform and not relegated further down the technology stack, so it does not require costly wholesale, forklift-style upgrades to your data center. It can be rolled out incrementally. And SAP RTDP is not just about HANA. It intrinsically incorporates established technologies such as SAP Sybase ASE, SAP Sybase IQ, SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere, and, yes, even third-party databases like Oracle and DB2. Needless to say, SAP’s Real Time Data Platform will run on virtually any preferred enterprise data center server and OS system. Finally, it truly is an end-to-end solution that spans OLTP, OLAP, predicative and social workloads, a complete development environment, and comprehensive deployments from business warehouses to mobile and embedded devices like smartphones, tablets and edge appliances.
I will dive into more detail about SAP RTDP in coming entries to this blog. But I’ll close this post with another bold claim. Putting SAP RTDP at the core of your data strategy will improve operational efficiencies, sharpen your competitive edge, and introduce growth opportunities previously unavailable. While Shakespeare may not have had RTDP in mind when he observed, “Make use of time, let not advantage slip,” his words would be a perfect motto for our platform.
