About Penalties, European Championship and SAP HANA

[SSoellheim]

Guest blog by Tania Stepan, SUSE (Twitter: @suse_dach)

Have you seen the match on Saturday between Germany and Italy like me? This was a real penalty soccer thriller. I could not sit still even knowing that my team, the German National Football Team, is well prepared. How did I know? Well first of course I trust in Manuel Neuer, the best goal-keeper in the world, the team itself and then I was remembering myself of an article I read some weeks ago before the European Championship started. The article was a about a relatively new software solution developed by SAP: SAP Sports One.

SAP Sports One is based on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. A key advantage of the SAP HANA-based platform is that it facilitates the processing of vast amounts of football-related Big Data. Do you know that SUSE is the #1 platform for SAP HANA?! Over 90% of all SAP HANA implementations run on SUSE Linux Enterprise. But let’s come back to the fancy SAP Sports One solution.

One functionality included in it is the Penalty Insights Function.

This provides goalkeepers and goalkeeping coaches with insights into the tactical behavior related to penalty kicks. You can search the top five or more players most likely to take penalty kicks, the areas of the goal they usually aim at, specific shot characteristics such as the player’s run, and so on. How cool is that! Before you play against a team in the tournament you can check out everything about the players especially how they act in penalty kicks. I mean not everyone can do that only those teams who work together with SAP Sports One on that like my team the DFB is doing.

Knowing that I was sure that Manuel Neuer got the well prepared information from the goalkeeping coach Andreas Köpke and that they exactly knew how the Italian player will kick their penalties. Nevertheless information in penalty kicks is not everything, you need luck too. And this time we had both. Perfect information and luck and made it to the the semi-finals at the European Championships in France. Next match is France and even knowing that there is this cool solution based on SAP HANA Cloud platform available I hope we do not need to go until the penalties again but are successful within the regular time and go to the final.