Embedded analytics: the key differentiator to a real data-driven organization
Data is everywhere, but unfortunately access, insights and direct feedback is still a longsome and tedious process. What if all your action could always instantly be backed by facts resulting from the data you produce?
This is only one of the challenges companies still face.
The technology development lifecycle already evolved a lot last decennia, bringing more agility in organizations to respond swiftly to events occurring in the market, but not yet fast and flexible enough.
Analytics all over the application stack
In the keynote at the recent SAP TechEd, we saw a live demo, of how an approval form was built on the fly with zero to no coding, selecting the data sets needed and defining security, all based on analytics and metadata, available in the SAP cloud platform. Maybe not all so new, since there are various other open source RAD (Rapid Application Development) frameworks and tools out there.
The key here is the integration of business processes, data, security, analytics, infrastructure and scalability.
In the other frameworks there is still a major effort involved to tie everything together, take care of the infrastructure, worry about security, and if your business grows, you worry about performance and availability.
Byron Banks (VP Product Marketing Analytics)
All the SAP people we talked to, dropped the term ‘embedded analytics’, and from these discussions it came clear SAP is indeed providing analytics everywhere in SAP Cloud platform and S/4 HANA.
Talks with Ken Tsai (Head of SAP Data Management) and Iver Van de Zand (Head of pre-sales), build my understanding on what they mean with embedded analytics.
A part of the confusion comes from the fact, SAP still has their legacy systems, where the integration is not as such, and all applications are more or less stand alone.
Looking at the roadmap, it becomes clear how, analytics will be available at every step in your business process, and everywhere in your business.
Modeling from the business perspective with SAP HANA, The all in one integrated database
Stefan Hoffman and Tobias Koebler, from SAP HANA database and SAP DataHub, build further in my understanding of how the data management has been changed in SAP core system, to provide agile modelling, spatial intelligence, embedded analytics, streaming and real-time analytics and strong data management.
But what about all those performance issues?
The adoption of SAP HANA with its in-memory technology core has improved application performance dramatically. Not only transactions execute faster, but it is now possible to run analytics on live business data within the same system and using the same data model. This means your business processes become intelligent and can provide up-to-date insights to users at each interaction point along a business process.
Philip On (Global Vice President, Marketing – Database, Machine Learning, and Cloud Platform Solutions)
IT landscapes also become simpler as it is no longer necessary to move business data to an external system for data analysis. Plus, indexes and materialized data structures can be avoided since SAP HANA aggregates data on-the-fly and returns results instantly, allowing applications to perform out-of-the-box.
With a significant lower system administration burden and shorter response times, which leads to higher user productivity, SAP HANA makes it easier to derive value from all data assets and lowers the cost of data-driven innovation. 
Furthermore, SAP HANA is capable of handling all types of data – not just business data but also geospatial, text, sensor, and social media data. This capability, for example, allows you to extend your business processes to recommend a website visitor a new product based on the sentiment analysis of her social media interactions. You can even mobilize a field maintenance crew to a given location in response to a failure detected by the real-time analysis of sensor data streaming from the IoT. SAP HANA allows you to put all your data to work and delivers the full situation awareness you need to act in the moment.
