As I spend a couple of days at SapphireNow, the SAP user conference in Orlando, it is timely to acknowledge the impact of the vendor on many sections of upcoming book, The New Polymath.
Several SAP customers, partners, Mentors, present and former employees like John Dean, Mike Prosceno, Marilyn Pratt, Gretchen Lindquist, Dennis Howlett, Craig Cmehil, Dan McVeeney, Jeffrey Word, Jon Reed, Ramana Rao, Nenshad Bardoliwalla and others are either profiled in the book or had a role in shaping the book.
Some excerpts:
In the chapter on industry disruptors: “(Dr. Hasso) Plattner’s radical concept is to get a 100 × compression by rethinking traditional data and storage optimization. The research at HPI shows that columnar databases can yield a 10 × space advantage compared to row – based ones. With increased processing power available today, we can also compute on – demand aggregate data, which historically was more efficient to store in databases. That provides another 2 × advantage. Finally, Plattner would tier data based on currency — storing only recent (and more likely to be accessed) data on the memory on the blade server, which could provide another 5 × compression. 10 × 2 × 5 would get the 100 × compression he seeks.”
In the section on how Germany is leading the world in cleantech: “SAP has developed a “ sustainability map ” (see
Figure 12.1 ) to let its customers start to plan for a world with a different set of operational metrics.”
In the chapter on communities: “Jim Spath at Black & Decker (since merged with the Stanley Works) says: “ SAP has built out an amazingly lively space for all manner of dialog to commence, not simply questions and answers. SDN has expanded my network of contacts beyond an existing peer circle in the Americas SAP Users Group (ASUG).” and “One SAP executive was quoted as saying, “ Average time from question to answer is less than 30 minutes. I wish our own customer support channels were that effective. ”
