Webinar Q & A & Recording: Best Practices for SAP Predictive Analysis with SAP & IBM

[Former Member]

On October 24, we had a great webinar on the topic of "Best Practices for SAP Predictive Analysis with SAP & IBM". There were lots of interests and questions during the webinar.

You can find the on-demand replay here: https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=523548&se...

Below is the list of answers provided by our fantastic speakers - Charles Gadalla & Gagan Reen..

Question:

Are there plans to combine this kind of analytical tools with business rules management systems that drive the day-to-day decisions inside a company?

Answer:

Absolutely! This is the killer space for SAP.

Question:

What does SAP have with Hadoop? Do you have an internal offering of Hadoop?

Answer:

SAP HANA has a Hadoop integration that allows hive ql to bring data into HANA for analysis. This is extremely helpful to analyze BIG!! DATA and bring in structured/unstructured data together.

Question:

What is a role of SAP HANA in Predctive Analysis?

Answer:

HANA is not required, but it can REALLY speed things up!

Question:

Are there any reference customers in the US in financial services? Banking or securities?

Answer:

We're currently working with several large opportunities. They're under NDA at the moment - but a public reference should be coming soon.

Question:

Can you please elaborate more on Big Data?

Answer:

If you look at www.experiencesaphana.com, you'll find some interesting perspectives.

Question:

What is the connection between the sales data and the data taken from social intelligence?

Answer:

Basically, the SAP Sentiment Intelligence will bring the data into HANA where it can be merged with transactional and Sales data.

Question:

Any specifics you can mention? Integration with NetWeaver BRM, NW Decision Service Management, other tools? Roadmap?

Answer:

Several RDS deployments are under-way (Sentiment Intelligence, Fraud analysis, Claims adjustment).

Question:

By the way, do the tools work with databases other than HANA like Teradata?

Answer:

Absolutely: we have JDBC connectors that hook into most dBs (Teradata included).

Question:

Will SAP PA Designer allow to use 4000 R algorithms?

Answer:

Coming soon for all 4,000 algorithms - currently we natively support a subset of them in a visual manner. But you can write a script for any of the other 4,000 algorithms through the HANA Predictive Analysis Library. Shortly we'll be able to support all 4,000 through the visual interface (no script).

Question:

How does Predictive Analysis relate to Enterprise Architecture?

Answer:

Basically it can be configured as a desktop environment (Windows 7) so the Client tool will call out to the dB and bring the data in for analysis. The results can be written back in as a data table for a reporting tool to consume.

Question:

Can you talk about partner enablement?

Answer:

Happily, we have over 40 partners in the Ramp Up program and we'd love to have you to join! Contact me: charles.gadalla@sap.com and I'll connect you.

Question:

When will this product be available?

Answer:

It's currently in Ramp Up, and is scheduled for GA shortly (likely Sapphire EMEA in November - but I can't guarantee this).

Question:

We are an SAP customer with the latest version of your ECC software but we use Teradata as our EDW and Tableau as our visualization software. Would love to see this in action.

Answer:

Actually that's not an uncommon scenario. So we would drop the result of the Predictive Analysis into HANA, Business Objects Universe, Teradata, etc. as a data table that Tableau can consume and build a report off of.