The events of 2020 have placed renewed importance on organisations’ ability to deal with widespread uncertainty, disruption and change.
Modern organisations are faced with the daunting task of collecting, storing and analysing vast amounts of data and deriving insights from that data that inform decisions and lead to improved business outcomes.
The large volume of data means this is no easy feat: by 2025, the world will produce 463 exabytes of data a day, equivalent to more than 212 million DVDs every day.
Organisations are dependent on technology tools to collect, reconcile and rapidly process data to deliver insights into the performance of the business. In 2010, SAP released what would be a game-changer for real-time data processing and insights generation: its in-memory relational database management system SAP HANA.
SAP HANA sits at the heart of our business applications, including our flagship business suite SAP S/4HANA. It is designed to help organisations make sense of a broad range of data types and make accurate decisions in real time thanks to the integration of intelligent technologies. Organisations can use SAP HANA to embed real-time machine learning into business processes to empower them with predictive capabilities, while integration to the SAP Analytics Cloud gives organisations confidence to make accurate end-to-end business decisions.
In a recent study by IDC, organisations that are using SAP HANA to achieve business gains and operational efficiencies had on average achieved return on investment of 679% over a five-year period, achieving revenue gains of $34.1-million per organisation.
Organisations use SAP HANA to enable the development of intelligent custom applications and increase the pace of innovation in a cost-effective way by simplifying the management of data, and improving access to data and insights. By leveraging data, organisations can more easily identify new opportunities for revenue growth and create new services to better meet customer demands.
SAP HANA is used by more than 28 000 organisations around the world to analyse complex data and deliver actionable insights in real time through custom applications and innovative use cases. According to Beveridge, SAP HANA delivers business value along four key areas, namely:
1. Risk mitigation
By reducing the impact of outages on users and business, organisations can achieve higher business productivity and minimise revenue losses. The IDC study found that HANA users achieved 21% higher gross productivity for users.
2. Improved IT team productivity
SAP HANA enables custom application development that substantially improves the productivity of developers and database administrators, with up to five times higher productivity and an 18% gain in database administration efficiency.
3. Reduced operational costs
By leveraging HANA to identify inefficiencies and gaining a deeper understanding of expense structures, organisations can lower their operational costs and make savings of more than R15-million ($845,800) per organisation per year.
4. Higher levels of business productivity
The IDC study found that leveraging data in innovative use cases for custom applications increased revenue and improved employee productivity levels while reducing business operational costs. This unlocks value of more than R100-million ($6.45m) per organisation per year through higher revenue, increased productivity and lower costs.
It’s critical that organisations leverage their data to drive competitive advantage. With the world in a state of widespread disruption and constant change, having the benefit of accurate data over the total performance of the business and developing insights in real time can mean the difference between growth and decline, success or failure. The tools we need to navigate this uncertain period are already available: organisations now need to take the bold step of empowering their decision-making with the powerful business technology platform from SAP.
Pieter van der Merwe is the Regional Sales Director for Platform and Technologies at SAP Africa.
