August 16, 2012 // 17 HANA Apps in 2 Hours
Ingo Brenckmann, senior development manager at SAP, discusses HANA (Photo: SAP.info)
What’s the incentive for SAP to run such a program? Aiaz Kazi, SVP Technology and Innovation Platform at SAP, explained: “A platform is only as good as the applications that run on it. SAP alone doesn’t have the capacity to develop the thousands of applications that HANA needs to be successful. Plus, we probably wouldn’t have the same diversity of really unique and interesting use cases that we get from startups around the world.”
That was certainly true in Berlin, where 17 different use cases for HANA were presented in just over two hours. The remaining 18 startups shared their ideas in a sort of “trade fair” at the end of the event, making this the most highly attended SAP Startup Forum thus far. “This is fitting, since SAP HANA was born just 20 miles away at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam,” said Cafer Tosun, SVP and managing director of the SAP Innovation Center at the HPI, in his opening keynote. “Close collaboration with HPI paved the way for HANA, and this area can be proud of that.” In continued support of SAP HANA, the SAP Innovation Center also sponsored the startup event in Berlin.
From individualized medicine, to food quality control, and image and music analytics – the proposed solutions varied widely. But almost every startup gave a similar reason for wanting to run their idea on HANA: faster results on more intricate analyses with more data. Here is an overview of just some of the projects:
A big data company for online and mobile games, they are specifically involved with free-to-play games, where players purchase virtual goods with real money. In order to turn users into paying customers, game companies need to understand player behavior and detect their purchase patterns.
Honeytracks offers a cloud-based big data solution that analyzes massive amounts of data generated through users’ online transactions to deliver these insights. And although it’s looking to improve its offering on the SAP HANA platform, Honeytracks isn’t shy about advertising its own cutting-edge technology.
This company uses next-generation DNA sequencing to predict whether a patient will respond to a given therapy. For cancer patients, 80 percent of which have no real clinical benefit from treatment, this is especially relevant. If doctors know ahead of time, whether a patient is likely to respond to a particular drug, they can eliminate ineffective treatments right from the start.
The challenge here – and the opening for SAP HANA – is the size and complexity of the data. A human genome represents 1-2 terabytes of data. Furthermore, results need to be delivered fast. Cancer patients don’t have the luxury of waiting weeks and months to receive their optimal therapy.
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