It was late and I was watching a thriller movie while suddenly the movie stopped and the TV screen turned black. Great! Before I had even checked the technical infrastructure my neighbor was calling on my cell phone. He asked if I still had internet access. After explaining to him I was encountering the same issue and talking a bit about this and that I went to bed. But since I had an idea in my head for this blog I picked up my iPad on the way to my bed and started typing this blog.
The internet outage made me think about how technical infrastructure, machines and the software which runs on those machines are not yet near as intelligent as they could be. When you look at how complicated humans are build it becomes clear that creating an artificial intelligence that can act, talk, walk, interact, feel, think and even rant is not that easy. While science is making progress we are still far away from anything that comes close to a human being.
Yesterday I was reading up on Solution Manager and I came across a webinar page where Solution Manager was being referred to as "the nervous system" for your SAP system landscape. I thought that the reference was seriously exaggerated. Some call Solution Manager "the command center" which is still slightly exaggerated but at least offers a better description.
The human body is controlled by our nervous system which receives incoming calls and reacts to those (I know very simple explanation). From time to time those incoming calls contain alerts which are triggered and automatically action is taken. The actions taken are not always visible and can sometimes be very subtle. We don't auto-react to a falling in love signal by blurting it out to the person in question which is probably a good thing. Some might actually do that though. Just remember this: "a system is never perfect".
Solution Manager as a nervous system for SAP system landscapes is what I want for Christmas and what I will put on my Solution Manager wish list. I believe SAP is getting close to enabling Solution Manager to act as a command center. While it might not yet feature everything a command center should have it has potential and Solution Manager 7.1 is looking pretty good.
The future is automated. There are even predictions system administrators will hardly be needed anymore in the far future. I do believe that our line of work will drastically change over time. Why isn’t it evident for Solution Manager to be the nervous system of your SAP system landscape? The human nervous system is extremely complex and it processes a massive amount of data every second. It’s like our own personal in-memory database that processes billions of records, analyzes those records and responds to it by sending the right signals throughout our body.
In order to use the term “nervous system” for Solution Manager it will need integration of HANA for sure to be able to process massive amounts of information and react to those. Yes you could already automate some reactions from Solution Manager using CCMS and auto-reaction methods but nothing that comes near to what a nervous system could achieve.
I’m excited to see what the next five years will bring in terms of transforming Solution Manager into a nervous system. Hopefully SAP leans into Solution Manager, catches the idea of building a nervous system and connects Solution Manager to HANA to get the processing of massive amounts of data going and really create magic.
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