By Ken Murphy @KMurphyWisPubs

LAS VEGAS – SAP's Executive Vice President and GM of SAP Database and Technology made one thing abundantly clear during Tuesday morning’s keynote presentation at SAPinsider’s CRM, Logistics and SCM, Manufacturing, PLM, and Procurement conference: Businesses should not consider SAP HANA a luxury item.

No, customers need to invest in SAP HANA if they are serious about “raising the water line of your business,” said Steve Lucas.

And that, he said, is what SAP HANA will do.

Of course, aware that he was laser-focused on SAP HANA, Lucas regrouped after some opening comments and spoke briefly instead about big data, cloud computing and mobility -  three megatrends that apply across all lines of business and drive use cases for investing in SAP’s in-memory technology.

He joked that he changed gears just a minute or two into his opening remarks “because I’ve already said HANA 17 times.”

But, Lucas reminded the more than 1,000 attendees, the evolution of the smartphone is akin to what SAP HANA does. Just like music players, phones, and cameras are all now ubiquitous on one device, SAP HANA blends existing technologies into something unique and innovative.

In explaining the rationale for creating SAP HANA, Lucas brought up an example of a manufacturer who needs to make snap decisions when a disaster causes production of a part to halt.

“This is why we created HANA,” he said. “So that when you’re on the phone with your supplier, before you hang up the phone you have answers to all of your questions. … We created SAP HANA for two reasons: To go faster, and to drive innovation.”

Lucas then sought to dispel what he sees as a major hurdle: customers who wonder about the “art of the possible.” In short, the answer to the question “What’s in it for my business?”

He said the “aha” moment for him came when he was speaking to the CIO of a utility company who told him that he doesn’t sit around thinking 24/7 about what SAP HANA can do. “Give me a menu,” he told Lucas. “Show me what it can do.”

“That really struck me,” said Lucas, “And in the last few weeks we’ve taken action (to remedy this). It’s time for HANA.”

Lucas then gave examples for the three main things that running SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA accomplishes. It is, he said, “absolutely smarter, it’s absolutely faster, and it’s simpler.”

There are, he detailed, more than 400 business optimizations currently enabled from running SAP HANA across all lines of business, and 23 industry-specific optimizations.

One optimization he pointed out was the  ability for a business to combine all of its product data with all of its customer data in an instant and retrieve actionable business intelligence.

Among other benefits, SAP HANA, he said:

• Allows a company to consistently and constantly model its business
• Eliminates data duplication
• Allows for intuitive multi-dimensional queries across a business
• Gives a user a seamless dashboard with no filters or menus
• Gives businesses a transactional, dimensional, analytic, predictive and text engine all on one platform

Lucas drove home that final point: running SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA is what a business needs to capitalize on breakthrough, transformative applications; with the understanding that the 400-plus that he mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg.

Later today, each line of business (CRM, SCM and Logistics, Manufacturing, and Procurement) will have their individual General Assemblies at the SAPinsider event. It's a safe bet that SAP HANA will be mentioned in all of them.

We’ll keep count on “SAP HANA” references and see if they match Lucas’s estimate from his own keynote. More later!

By Ken Murphy.

Several factors look to make 2013 a watershed year for the smartphone, but perhaps the biggest is their increased demand in emerging economies. According to a few recent reports that take a closer look at this growing smartphone demand, businesses that merge their mobility and globalization strategies to capitalize on the trend will likely not be lacking potential new customers.

Just how fast is smartphone demand accelerating globally? Market researcher IHS iSuppli predicts that smartphones will have eclipsed feature phones to account for the majority of global cellphone shipments by the end of next year – two years earlier than anticipated. (The forecast: smartphones will account for 54 percent of the total cellphone market next year, up from 46 percent in 2012 and 35 percent in 2011). The market share report cites a stronger than expected demand from emerging economies for lower-cost products as one of the factors driving that acceleration.

Results from the Accenture Mobile Web Watch survey, released Tuesday, suggest that demand for smartphones in emerging economies is driven by the desire for Internet access. A case in point is South Africa, where 57 percent of respondents reported that they intended to purchase a web-enabled phone in the ‘near future’ – 9 percent more than respondents across all 13 countries surveyed. (The survey polled consumers in 13 countries across Europe, Latin America and South Africa using a sample representative of Internet users across age, gender and incomes.) 

Other research confirms that South African smartphone owners didn’t buy a device only so they could ditch their landline, but to access data online. A Mobility 2012 research study conducted by World Wide Worx reports that the average South African cellphone user’s spend on data increased 50 percent from the end of 2010 to the middle of this year, from 8 percent of total budget to 12 percent. Over the same time period, those same users cut spending on voice minutes from 77 percent to 73 percent.

“Spend on data is a barometer for the rapid increase both in the number of Internet users in South Africa and in the intensity with which experienced users engage with the Internet,” says Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of World Wide Worx, which released its findings in late July.

Businesses in these emerging markets that recognize this increasing use of smartphones for data transfer and transactional activity can position themselves to make transformational changes. One company that recognized early how it could benefit from mobile growth was Standard Bank, which is headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, and – with 15,000 employees and operating in 18 African countries – is the largest bank on the continent. Realizing they couldn’t bring brick and mortar banks to large swaths of the rural population in South Africa, Standard Bank harnessed the power of mobility to bring banking to the masses, so to speak.

As this insiderPROFILES story describes, a year ago Standard Bank deployed the SAP for Banking industry solution on the Sybase Unwired Platform to enable the origination of accounts on a mobile device in about eight minutes. The result is Standard Bank is originating more than 7,000 new accounts per day, and hopes to put a dent in the poverty level across Africa.

It’s a great example of how one company recognized a trend and capitalized on it for both their own benefit and that of their customer base.

By Ken Murphy

Recent research suggests the social CRM marketplace is growing at a rapid pace, but before many businesses stake their claim in this enterprise frontier, they’re waiting on two important markers: Defining exactly what value they hope to glean from the social data collected, and whether that benefit is worth the investment in social CRM.

So far, it appears that being able to measure a concrete ROI has yet to catch up with the burgeoning market. According to research from Gartner, just half of Fortune 1000 companies who have invested in social CRM systems will see a worthwhile ROI on their social CRM initiatives this year.

That’s not to say that businesses aren’t working on establishing parameters for their social CRM strategies. Gartner also predicts that by the end of the year 75 percent of new social CRM initiatives that are funded will have incorporated a measurable ROI in their business plan.

 “Social data, such as numbers of fan pages and weekly Tweets, is not enough to correlate with the contribution of top business objectives,” says Gartner research director Adam Sarner. “ROI, measurable business value and budget justification for social projects are becoming unavoidable topics for many organizations.”

Hence the rapid market growth. Consider that by year-end, total revenue from social CRM software licenses and subscriptions are expected to yield a more than a 100 percent increase from even just a year ago, according to Gartner research.  And that with this impressive uptick in sales, social CRM is expected to account for 8 percent of the total CRM market, also up 100 percent from a year ago. This is according to data Gartner released concurrent with its CRM Magic Quadrant for Social CRM 2012.

If this trend continues, it will be interesting to see how much emphasis companies place on social CRM vs. traditional CRM systems. Perhaps some companies are late to the social CRM game not because they haven’t determined how to measure ROI, but because they are still trying to squeeze more out of their traditional CRM systems. According to a recent Charles Schwab poll of more than 1,600 registered investment advisors, just 6 percent said that their companies were using CRM to its maximum potential. Asked the primary use of their existing CRM system, 98 percent identified the storage of customer information. The next highest identified use was preparing and sending client communication – listed by just 61 percent of respondents.

So, what’s the next big trend in social CRM? Where is this all heading? Gartner researchers say that the next two years will be crucial in the social CRM growth path. How well companies and providers tie CRM projects to measurable business objectives will be one of the biggest factors in social CRM’s eventual place in the market.

Of course, the very nature of social CRM suggests that customers, not businesses, will play a large role in determining what those objectives might be.