SAP has launched the most high-stakes overhaul of its core software line in more than two decades, aiming to convince multinational corporate customers that its software can now run their most critical applications to predict business conditions.Europe's biggest software company said on Tuesday its widely used suite of corporate planning applications and newer cloud-based Internet software are set to work together using a single, modern user interface.
Analysts estimate this means hundred or even thousand-fold improvements in SAP data-crunching times. The unified database platform, called S4 HANA, promises to cut the time it takes to compile business accounts and forecasts to minutes, instead of hours or days, by analysing vast amounts of data in local memory rather than slower magnetic disk drives.
"I expect a nice tailwind of growth out of this," Chief Executive Bill McDermott said of S4, speaking at SAP's annual capital markets meeting at the New York StockExchange. "We are really ready to come out and start accelerating," he said.
Established software makers such as SAP are battling to boost Internet software sales and fend off pure cloud-based rivals such as Salesforce.com and Workday. All major database vendors including Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Teradata also offer "in-memory" versions and dozens more rivals supply predictive analytics software in the cloud.
Yet, SAP has staked out a big, early lead in the market for real-time business planning software by signing up around 2,000 of its corporate customers to HANA, according to some analysts.
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