Customers Show the Power of SAP® In-Memory Computing Technology

SAP HANA™ Brings the Benefits of Real Real-Time Computing to Companies Around the Globe

ORLANDO, Fla. - - Just one year after heralding the breakthrough potential of in-memory computing, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today reveals some of the pioneering customer successes that are driving the technology’s adoption worldwide. Enabling instant access to and analysis of massive amounts of information, SAP® In-Memory Computing technology helps companies identify and act on new opportunities, better manage their business networks and develop smarter, more dynamic planning processes. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 15-18, 2011.

A recent study by Oxford Economics, “Real-Time Business: Playing to Win in the New Global Marketplace” [PDF], found that 30 percent of the companies surveyed have implemented some kind of real-time IT system, and 65 percent of the remainder have plans to do so in the near future. In addition, early adopters are reporting significant benefits: On average, companies that have implemented such systems are seeing average revenue gains of 21 percent and cost reductions of 19 percent. In fact, among early adopters, 77 percent report revenue gains with even higher revenue gains in certain industries like oil and gas.

With SAP’s unique approach to in-memory computing technology, customers are using SAP® In-Memory Appliance software (SAP HANA™) to help them achieve those goals. Unlike competitors, SAP In-Memory Computing does not disrupt existing IT landscapes and helps simplify customers’ architecture.

Previously slowed down by huge amounts of data and the limits of traditional disk-based systems, customers are benefiting from the business value of SAP HANA, gaining the speed and power necessary to respond to changing business conditions as they occur. Below are testimonies from early adopters on SAP In-Memory Computing technology.

Bosch and Siemens Home Appliances Group, One of the World’s Leading High-End Appliance Manufacturers
“SAP HANA gives us the tools to instantly perform complex calculations and forecast the impact in any changes to our business,” said Dr. Juergen Sturm, CIO, Bosch and Siemens Home Appliances Group. “Traditionally, this is very difficult to do in a company of our size that deals with diverse channels, dispersed manufacturing and global product sales of over EUR 9 billion. Real-time insight into which products are selling and in what volumes lets us quickly adjust manufacturing and distribution strategies, giving us an advantage against competitors.”

Canoe Ventures, Creator of Products and Services for Interactive Television Viewing
“Canoe Ventures has created the largest national interactive television platform available, connecting advertisers to 19 million households across a number of cable TV distributors with different systems,” said Domenic Centofanti, vice president, Data Architecture, Canoe Ventures. “To build a successful business with the many operators in our ecosystem, it is paramount that Canoe’s solutions are flexible, scalable, secure and measurable. Our ability to scale is directly tied to our technical capability to interact with different distributor platforms and meet the needs of programming networks, their advertisers and their viewers. The capabilities of SAP HANA enable us to begin cost-effectively building an engine for delivering the reporting and analytics that advertisers need to engage viewers more effectively and in a secure manner to enhance the TV experience and justify their advanced television advertising spend.”

Central European Distribution Corporation (CEDC), Leading International Vodka Manufacturer
“Having grown both organically and through acquisitions of plants and companies across Eastern Europe, we needed a powerful solution to help us reign in and make sense of that information,” said Piotr Majewski, IT manager, CEDC International. “Because SAP HANA can process huge amounts of data from any source, it was the right solution for us. SAP In-Memory Computing will help us to gain better visibility into our sales force and plan our business strategy more accurately.”

Colgate-Palmolive, Top Global Consumer Products Company
“When SAP HANA was launched in December of last year, we did a proof of concept on customer sales and profitability analytics for one of our largest subsidiaries,” said Tom Greene, CIO, Colgate-Palmolive Company. “For a global business selling products in more than 200 countries and territories, it is critical for us to understand sales trends at a high level as well as at a more actionable level by retail location and SKU to drive our business goals. Prior to SAP HANA, we were unable to run full analytics in a reasonable timeframe. With SAP HANA, we will be able to run analytics at a local level on specific brands and locations, and at the lowest level of detail in real time.”

Lenovo, World-Renowned PC Manufacturer
“In an industry where products become obsolete quickly, we need both a deep and instant knowledge of customer behavior and products being sold globally,” said Xiaoyu Liu, vice president, Global Application Development, Lenovo. “That’s why Lenovo chose SAP Customer Relationship Management and supercharged it with SAP HANA. Using these solutions side by side will allow us to analyze orders by customer, region or product. This will improve our forecasting abilities and we’ll be able to introduce new products and services faster. Reporting on stale data is dead – we now explore the data on the fly and run the business based on the most recent events, customer relationships and product plans.”

Medidata Solutions, Leader in Software-as-a-Service for Clinical Development
“Medidata’s innovative solutions help life science organizations optimize the efficiency of their clinical trials, a highly data-intensive process, often generating billions of data points to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of just one drug or medical device,” said Glen de Vries, president, Medidata Solutions. “Clinical researchers are looking for new, different and better ways to analyze operational performance in real time. SAP In-Memory Computing gives us the potential to build highly interactive solutions for our customers without requiring them to go through a lengthy traditional data warehouse implementation.”

Nomura Research Institute (NRI), Leading IT Consulting and Service Provider
“We are currently performing tests on large volumes of traffic data using SAP HANA,” said Akihiko Nakamura, corporate senior vice president, Services & Industrial Solution Division, NRI. “The product has enabled us to search through 360 million data records in just a little over one second. This is indeed an incredibly fast speed for this amount of data. We had heard that SAP HANA enabled extremely strong performance, but to actually see and experience the speed and high performance firsthand is simply amazing. Now and in the future, speed is the key to adapting to an ever-changing business environment. The speed SAP HANA enables is sudden and significant, and has the potential to transform entire business models.”

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during the event series, visit the SAPPHIRE NOW newsroom.

SAPPHIRE® NOW
With SAPPHIRE® NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 15-18, 2011, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better.

Note to Editors:
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About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 170,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of Sybase) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.