“Big data is a trend that can no longer be ignored,” says Steve Lucas, Executive Vice President and General Manager at SAP.  Lucas and Timo Elliott, Technology Evangelist at SAP, were the keynote speakers at SAPinsider's BI 2012 conference in Las Vegas.

They started off by acknowledging the  uncertainty around the term “Big Data”.  They settled on identifying Big Data as “extreme data” because it cannot be captured, managed, and processed by traditional software tools within a reasonable time.  They also cited the “3 V’s of Big Data” -- Volume, Velocity, Variety -- and Elliott added “validity” as the 4th V, with an example of how 55 billion euros recently went missing in Germany due to a lack of data legitimacy.
 
They stressed that it’s not just about collecting data, but what you can do with it, and leveraging these new capabilities for business improvement. Lucas and Elliot both recognized how important the contributions from the open source community have been while pointing out that there are currently no Big Data applications running on top of these technologies.  This, they say, is where SAP comes into the picture.
 
The rest of the presentation focused on how you can get the most out of real time analytics, mobile, cloud, and social using SAP technology.  Here are a few examples:

•    Analytics – BI 4.0 on Amazon Cloud using SybaseIQ can run in a virtualized environment
•    Cloud – BI OnDemand powered by HANA (try it free here)
•    Mobile – “Recall Plus”, an app designed to monitor your child’s items, powered by HANA and mobile infrastructure

You can watch a replay of the keynote presentation here on Insider Learning Network.  Please note you must be logged in to view the replay.  If you’re not already a member, you can join here.

Want more more big data and analytics insight?  Check out Data Informed.