Services for Organizations

Using our research, best practices and expertise, we help you understand how to optimize your business processes using applications, information and technology. We provide advisory, education, and assessment services to rapidly identify and prioritize areas for improvement and perform vendor selection

Consulting & Strategy Sessions

Ventana On Demand

    Services for Investment Firms

    We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.

    Consulting & Strategy Sessions

    Ventana On Demand

      Services for Technology Vendors

      We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.

      Analyst Relations

      Demand Generation

      Product Marketing

      Market Coverage

      Request a Briefing



        Robert Kugel's Analyst Perspectives

        << Back to Blog Index

        SAP Takes Business and Finance Mobile Using SAP HANA

        SAP has inaugurated a new series of business applications it calls Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) OnDemand as a cloud-based subscription service. The applications are part of SAP’s EPM version 10 suite, which it introduced last year. It’s a first step in what is likely to be a portfolio of general-purpose, lightweight and relatively low-cost apps designed to be used on mobile devices. Using HANA on the back end, the applications can deliver high performance in accessing masses of business data and deliver actionable information to executives and managers. The three on-demand apps in EPM are for expense management, profit-and-loss (P&L) analysis and capital project management. They also just released its SAP Business Planning and Consolidation that has a mobile version on the Apple iPad that is part of its recently announced EPM UnWired. The move is another indication of SAP’s emphasis on cloud computing, which my colleague Mark Smith covered earlier this year.

        OnDemand’s analytics are hardly advanced and the scope of the information they use doesn’t break any new ground, but that’s not the point. Increasingly people have been integrating mobile devices into their day-to-day work. Executives carry around tablets while doing “management by walking around.” Being able to call up specific numbers relevant to their parts of the business, visualize them graphically and drill down to detail enables managers or executives to have structured dialogs with direct reports about what just happened and what to do next. (Business dialogs become structured when numbers are applied to generalizations.) Running the applications on HANA means that even complex models will return answers quickly – a key requirement because to be useful for business dialogs, response times must be fast. Since the applications are already running in the cloud, it really doesn’t matter where or when users access them.

        EPM OnDemand and its latest UnWired applications also serves as a proof-of-concept demonstration of what IT departments could do to quickly develop (and change) their own business-focused mobile analytics running on EPM and HANA. These would be lightweight analytics applications built around the exact needs of specific types of businesses – for example, measures and metrics particular to steel service centers, high-volume repetitive manufacturing, or engineering and construction.

        To make its on-demand apps more accessible and useful, SAP has integrated Microsoft Office with them, so users can perform ad-hoc analyses of data sets using Excel and publish the results as part of a collaborative business process. Or, they could modify the output of a complex predictive model to reflect their own front-line insights and write a report back to a server where it would be immediately incorporated into the next iteration of an evolving operating plan. Or, sales managers could have a better insight into pricing products that are commodity cost-driven if, say, these incorporate real-time commodity futures feeds and up-to-date pay and benefits expenses into production cost models.

        To make these applications a success, SAP will have to expand the range of OnDemand applications, price them right and enhance their usability. As to this last point, the baby boom generation – the first to have business computing as a given in corporate life – is beginning to retire. Coming up quickly are people who have woven computing devices into every recess of their lives. Mobile computing platforms and the evolution (albeit slow) of HTML will enable (and force) software designers to rethink how work gets done as the conceptual line between the design of business and personal applications increasingly blurs.

        Regards,

        Robert Kugel – SVP Research

        Authors:

        Robert Kugel
        Executive Director, Business Research

        Robert Kugel leads business software research for Ventana Research, now part of ISG. His team covers technology and applications spanning front- and back-office enterprise functions, and he personally runs the Office of Finance area of expertise. Rob is a CFA charter holder and a published author and thought leader on integrated business planning (IBP).

        JOIN OUR COMMUNITY

        Our Analyst Perspective Policy

        • Ventana Research’s Analyst Perspectives are fact-based analysis and guidance on business, industry and technology vendor trends. Each Analyst Perspective presents the view of the analyst who is an established subject matter expert on new developments, business and technology trends, findings from our research, or best practice insights.

          Each is prepared and reviewed in accordance with Ventana Research’s strict standards for accuracy and objectivity and reviewed to ensure it delivers reliable and actionable insights. It is reviewed and edited by research management and is approved by the Chief Research Officer; no individual or organization outside of Ventana Research reviews any Analyst Perspective before it is published. If you have any issue with an Analyst Perspective, please email them to ChiefResearchOfficer@ventanaresearch.com

        View Policy

        Subscribe to Email Updates

        Posts by Month

        see all

        Posts by Topic

        see all


        Analyst Perspectives Archive

        See All