As an IT professional with a decade long experience that revolves around analytics, here is my simplistic take on what’s happening recently in the world of ‘Business Intelligence’.
With the way that the big data and analytics market is heating up right now, enterprise software and in-memory computing provider, SAP, is in an envious position.
The way the enterprise technology scene may remember it, SAP was literally first to market some five years ago, with HANA or High Performance Analytic Appliance, an in-memory appliance which could perform analytics computations extremely fast.
Since then, main memory technology shot into the spotlight, and big data and analytics solutions which does not also have an in-memory component, is not worth a second look.
Players like Oracle, IBM, Software AG and who knows how many more, were scrambling before, but now, they are more or less ready to do ‘battle’ in the real-time analytics arena.
Which brings us to SAS and my expectation of its ‘wedding’ into the SAP harem, pretty soon.
SAS is the world’s largest privately owned software company, with over USD2 billion yearly revenue since about five years ago. They also work closely with HP to offer their analytics solutions on HP’s infrastructure.
Well, October 22nd, 2013, marked a momentous occasion for SAS, as well as SAP. Both have agreed to not only collaborate on a technology and product roadmap, but also to execute a co-sell pilot programme.
This deal is great for SAP because they already do so exceedingly well with their vertical-focused business applications. Adding on a market-leading analytics solution layer, makes the high-performance HANA proposition more alluring.
As for SAS, this deal ensures that the privately-owned company remains relevant in a market place that seems to be crowding out the analytics-only company.
If SAP manages to woo SAS further and actually acquire it, that is probably a good idea too commercial-wise, as it’s time for the openly defiant SAS CEO Jim Goodnight to take a step back and enjoy an advisory role that better suits his age.
I hope I am not hoping for too much, but the amalgamation between these two giant ‘S’es may just do the trick for business intelligence to finally launch to the moon.
IT Bytes Back! says: SAP and SAS not only look cute together, but could be a potentially potent couple traversing the Analytics scene and setting the trendiest BI trends for the next 5 years.
