SAP HANA, my first date: Kiss or Diss?

[former_member186257]

After returning from my social sabbatical in Brazil and the fellowship at the corporate strategy group in Newtown Square, the SAP Americas headquarter, I’m now assuming a new job opportunity as lead architect for high performance customer analytics applications, specifically SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence powered by SAP HANA. Continue reading and learn more about my first date with HANA 😉

SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence is a suite of new applications for Sales, Marketing and Services lines of business. Watch the following inspirational 3 minute video to learn about the purpose and value of these applications!

Looking at my packed onboarding plan with:

• so many personal meetings – I’m looking forward to get to know the teams working on these applications and ignite a trustful and credible relationship,
• a never-ending list of SAP HANA trainings, architecture blueprints and other documents, and
• a first customer onsite session with focus on pushing CRM on HANA and at the same time selling the new HPAs,

there are thrilling times ahead. With my IT engineering background, I first wanted to see – seeing is believing – these new applications. According to our mobility strategy, I started with the iPad app SAP Account Intelligence; coming closer to my first meeting with HANA.

The SAP Account Intelligence app starts with a map view that allows sales reps on the go to plan account visits in a territory. Based on the selection, it furthermore makes complex analyses very easy with a quadrant view and provides deep insight with KPIs; see the following screen shot. With it, sales execution can be planned effectively in-sync with marketing strategy and financial objectives. Patterns and trends can be identified in a very intuitive and visual appealing way using the time slider which is truly impressive considering the vast amount of data and calculations necessary. Finally, the app helps sales reps to sell more with top recommendations for products which might be interesting for their accounts… AMAZING! Suddenly other CRM solutions, in contrast, look and feel like products beamed in from the Stone Age. What a first date, thanks HANA!!! I believe that we can with this kind of apps deliver true customer value and be not only the HANA Company but the business innovation company.

P.S.: Although the SAP Account Intelligence mobile app is really not HANA and pretty far away from the database taking an architecture component-block diagram perspective, let me consider it as HANA because the stunning performance would not be possible without our next generation in-memory HANA database. Furthermore, please don’t tell my wife that I’m dating HANA. She is already suspicious about what I’m actually doing in my new job 😉