Transactional Data: Driving Real-Time Business

A GLOBAL SURVEY OF IT LEADERS SHOWS THAT MOST ORGANIZATIONS FIND CONVERTING HIGH VOLUMES OF FRESH TRANSACTIONAL DATA INTO KNOWLEDGE THAT BUSINESS USERS CAN EFFICIENTLY ACCESS, UNDERSTAND AND ACT ON IS CHALLENGING. SAP AND HP ARE TACKLING THIS CHALLENGE HEAD-ON.
Transactional data should be a window into your business strategy, but for most companies, opening that window takes more brute force than they might care to exert. Enabling that data to serve as the basis for analysis typically requires aggregating it from various transactional systems inside a data mart or a data warehouse or working with spreadsheets and the static data locked inside them. This pretty well defeats any hopes of executing business plans in real time based on dynamic data. Perhaps the situation in a large financial and insurance company that has some real-time access to its operational data will strike a chord: Were taking raw transactions and turning them into analytics, and from there were doing analysis trending and all that other good stuff, says the companys director of IT. Butand heres the catchits not real-time by the time that happens. Its only when the enterprise has access to and insight into up-to-the-minute data from ERP systems and other sources that the window opens wide, with greater ease. Turning high volumes of transactional data into knowledge that business users can efficiently access, understand and act onnot in hours or days but in seconds, and from any device, anywherematters for many reasons. They include everything from optimizing production management based on supplier and purchase order activity to boosting returns on retail promotions thanks to sales data savvyand doing it without having to aggregate, summarize or transform that data means reducing redundant infrastructure and batch processing jobs that add costs to the IT environment. Analyzing Data: Vision Versus reality Today that compelling vision is in contention with reality for many organizations. In a global survey of IT leaders conducted by IDg Research Services, nearly 80 percent said their main organizational goal for the next 12 months is to provide or maintain an information architecture that supports future business objectives involving customers, products, services and markets. We look for opportunities for new business and new revenue sourcesand a lot of it is related to the analytics we can doto do a better job of spotting things that are out of parameter, and then we level-set or reset when we see opportunities to cut costs or improve revenue streams because of that transactional data, says Rex Pruitt, manager, MIS profitability and risk, at PREMIER Bankcard. Definitely our goals and objectives are centered on doing that.

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Creating the information architecture many of the survey respondents seem to envision is a tall order: Only 27 percent of those who cited this requirement consider themselves to be extremely or very effective at doing the job now. In enterprises that want to do so much moreand so much fasterthan they can currently do in managing and analyzing data that describes events from business applications, thats just one of many gaps to fill. Enterprises are even less practiced at specific objectives such as these:
n Among the respondents, 67 percent said

Sixty-five percent of survey respondents said its important to predict and respond to customer needs in real time. Only 19% said they are effective or very effective at it.
execution system) holds data on materials status and labor as raw materials are converted into goods. Its only in the last year that the company has standardized on these systems and begun analyzing the data, with a primary focus on quality and cost information, such as which manufacturing processes have the most significant impacts on product quality. The process to date has required extracting data from the transactional systems in Excel format and loading it into an SAS environment. We use SAS statistical tools to generate correlations between quality laboratory results (such as about product stability and potency) with manufacturing conditions and variations, explains the director of technical operations systems and ERP. We also adjust for storage and movement information as well as lot tracking information from the ERP system. Supplier performance and customer information are next on the companys analysis sites, the director says. Indeed, depending on what a business wants to achieve, it may need to gain real-time access to transactional data from third parties such as suppliers and partners or from sources tracking macroeconomic indicators or competitive information. Although getting such third-party access is among the greatest challenges for survey respondents, many also could use help with internal data. Almost half of the respondents reported that it was at least somewhat difficult to have real-time reach into internal order/contract and customer information, and more than 40 percent said the same of operational company performance data. One-third cited this as an issue for corporate financial information. Bottom line: Theres room for improvement across the board. Less than 20 percent of the respondents reported that gaining access to any type of data affiliated with transactions in real time was very easy. With so much of it spread across so many systems and so much time and effort spent on processing it so that its useble to drive business decisions, its clear that most enterprises could use some help. For many that help will come in the form of tight ties between insight and analytics solutions that minimize database usage and administration and in-memory database technology that reduces reliance on disks for accelerated query processing that can lead to making informed business decisions virtually on the fly. Todays Workforce Is Mobile; Data Management and Analytics Must Be, Too Real-time analytics cant be tied to the desktopnot when more and more knowledge workers and executives who need to understand the data to be analyzed are as likely, or even more likely, to be on the road as they are in the office. Its critical or very important to support speedy transactional data access, modeling and analysis across mobile devices for executive/corporate managers as well as finance, sales and operations stakeholders and IT pros, according to survey-takers. Just 46 percent of the respondents see having such access in real time via mobile devices as critically important for marketing professionals, but IT and business leaders from very large companiesthose with 10,000 or more employees were significantly more likely to include that function in their must-have category. Those ambitions, however, have yet to be broadly realized. Executive and corporate managers and IT staff have such access in 45 and 42 percent of the cases, respectively, but for all other functions, such abilities are less assured. Only about one-quarter of operations and sales workers, one-fifth of finance

its critical or very important to be able to identify new business opportunities, but only 23 percent identified themselves as being quite effective at doing so.
n This trend continues with predicting and

responding to customer needs in real time; thats important for 65 percent of respondents, but only 19 percent reported being extremely or very effective at this.
n When it comes to accessing trend data

relative to customers upcoming needs, 64 percent clamor for it and 19 percent are particularly good at supporting it.
n Also, having the ability to quickly identify new

business opportunities ranks high for 67 percent but is a strong practice for only 23 percent. The diversity of the application ecosystem where financial order, invoice, logistics and other event-related data resides contributes to creating gaps. Survey respondents report that they rely primarily on financial reporting and ERP systems as well as personal productivity tools such as Excel for accessing, storing, analyzing, modeling, delivering, reporting and tracking transactional data. But other applications are also in the mix, and doing something with the data that spans them can add layers to enterprise architectures. At one large pharmaceutical company, with 900 employees and $1.2 billion in revenue, financial datasales, shipments, purchase orders and so onresides primarily in its ERP system, whereas its MES (manufacturing

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professionals and just 16 percent of marketers can use their mobile devices this way. Whats holding them back, given that the potential of self-service BI for facilitating data access and dashboard analysis across all endpoints, including mobile ones, is so compelling? Imagine the possibilities for the enterprise when workers roaming the factory floor can access intuitive, real-time BI and respond instantly to events as they occur. The answer may have to do with the challenges enterprises face in trying to deliver to wireless mobile platforms insights gleaned from processing queries across massive amounts of data efficiently (and in a visually coherent way). When it comes to the query performance question, in-memory technology for mapping data from ERP or other source

systems in a servers main memory steps in: Hundreds of billions of records can be analyzed in seconds rather than what would be, for users on mobile devices, an interminable and intolerable wait of minutes or longer. How close Are Users to real-Time Understanding of Transactional Data? One options exchange is realizing several benefits from access to transactional data. users can run queries with the help of its statistical analysis software, pulling in trading data in real time to display on the CEOs and CFOs dashboards. They have a real-time view of whats happening in the trading environmentall the different trading instruments and how they are performing, says the options exchanges

director of systems, storage and planning. A variety of data about the trades that businesses conduct with the exchange fuels decisions about which of them are eligible for discounts. Also, its regulation and surveillance departments are able to answer SEC inquiries about trades in real timethe legal department also benefits from being able to view real-time data, he says. As valuable as the promise of real-time access to this data on any device is, less than half of the respondents have an enterprisewide solution in place to manage and analyze it. They may have put in place some technology to address particular issues in a more piecemeal or layered and near-real-time fashion. For example, a director of technical operations systems and ERP in the pharmaceutical industry says that his company is focused on getting a near-real-time feed of select information from its ERP, MES and lab quality systems via a data mart. The little data mart is what we look at on a daily basis to see what happened today, where some issues might be and what might we need to adjust, such as an issue with the potency of a particular batch of medicine, he says. But many organizations desire to embrace a more holistic approach is clearly there: Of the respondents, 40 percent have enterprise-wide implementation plans. The drivers for, and therefore the expected outcomes of, investments in enterprisewide solutions for managing transactional data are greater flexibility and resiliency (76 percent) for the business, followed closely by improving the standardization of business processes and/or KPIs across departments and business units (73 percent). On the IT side, the overwhelming drivers, noted by 78 percent of the respondents, are reduced complexity and lowered costs (see chart). Deploying the right technology is just the starting point for successful deployments, however. The biggest barriers to the implementation of solutions for transactional data management, survey respondents said, have been the need to support integration solutions and skills across multiple business processes (cited by 59 percent) and a lack of resources to implement

IT Drivers for Data Management Solutions

% Critical/Very Important IT Drivers for Solutions Used to Manage Transactional Data

IT Drivers for Data Management Solutions

% Critical/Very Important IT Drivers Reducing IT complexity and lowering costsfor Solutions Used to Manage Transactional Data 78% through standards-based use of technology Reducing IT complexity and lowering costs Improving the business ability to through standards-based use reliance on IT self-supportand reduce of technology for data access and analysis Improving the business ability to Increasing the speed of transactional self-supportand reduce reliance on IT information flow analysis for data access and(in areas such as planning, forecasting, etc.) Increasing the speed of transactional information flow (in areas Improvingas planning, forecasting, etc.) such data control and governance Improving data control and governance Improving IT control and performance (managing IT as a business, SLAs) Improvingthe controlto quickly analyze Having IT ability and performance (managing IT as a business, SLAs) large volumes of data (trends, data-mining, predictive analytics) Having the ability to quickly analyze Having volumes ofto access and large the ability data (trends, manipulate both analytics) data-mining, predictivestructured and unstructured data Having the ability to access and

66% 66% 65% 65% 65% 65% 65%

78%
66% 65% 66% 65% 65% 65% 65% 64% 65% 57% 64%

65% 64%
57%

64% 57%

57% manipulate both structured How important are the following as IT of real-time organizations investments in solutions used to IT leaders recognize the value drivers for your access to data, yet fewer than half of and unstructured data access, transform, store, analyze, model, report, deliver, and place. respondents have an enterprise-wide solution intrack transactional data?
Source: IDG Research Services

How important are the following as IT drivers for your organizations investments in solutions used to access, transform, store, analyze, model, report, deliver, and track transactional data?
Source: IDG Research Services

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their vision (noted by 56 percent). It is possible, however, to speak to a critical hope many companies have about investing in transactional data management solutions: Among the respondents, 66 percent said that improving the self-support ability of the business and reducing reliance on IT for data access and analysis are critical IT drivers for moving in this direction. Taking Action Fortunately, a new solution presents ways to enable businesses to access critical information in real time and via a simple self-service model that gets around some obstacles, such as ITs own resource limits. SAP, co-innovating with partners and customers, has introduced the SAP In-Memory appliance (SAP HAnA). SAP HAnA uses an in-memory engine to speed data analysis, a development that comes along at a crucial time: The amount of data is growing, but the more available data is, the more difficult technically it becomes to access. That changes with SAP HAnA, which presents a new paradigm for making access to that data more real-time so that knowledge workers can make decisions that are based on actual information, not guesswork. The shifting economics of IT has helped prompt the development of this technology. With HPs Converged Infrastructure, customers benefit from major total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction while being enabled to efficiently run their IT, using faster and more-capable servers; storage and networks function as shared pools of interoperable resources. And now, through SAPs application of in-memory technology, those infrastructures can be colocated with software architectures that bring together data and its processing at the same time. The end result? Closing the gap between the desire to create an information architecture that supports future business objectives regarding customers, products, services and markets and the ability of businesses to actually accomplish that and realize greater ROI from their data. With a solution such as the SAP HAnA, a hardware/software platform that combines

Shifting economics of IT has helped prompt the development of technology that solves the problem of not being able to predict and respond to customers needs in real time.
the SAP Business Analytic Engine with server technology from HP, the promise of self-service BI for business users across desktop and mobile devices can be realized. Knowledge workers will no longer be limited to traditional querying and reporting but can also engage in true search and discovery, since they wont be constrained by IT to working with a restricted amount of data. Thanks to in-memory computing, IT can freely provide access to a greater amount of datatheres no worry that so much pounding on the database by so many users will send it crashing. And end users can use the mobile or desktop tools with which theyre already familiar for accessing data from the transaction database that is replicated on the HAnA platform. The HAnA road map starts with the appliance as a line-of-business solution rather than a data warehouse or data aggregation play. SAPs BusinessObjects is optimized to run on the HAnA appliance, and SAP is also delivering a suite of applications that can solve specific business problems by using transactional data with the help of a business-user-friendly modeling environment it has created. This should reduce requirements to call on IT or power users for help with analysis scenarios. Among about a dozen applications debuting or being planned for the appliance are some for strategic workforce and sales and operations planning, cash and liquidity and trade promotions management, and customer revenue performance as well as merchandising and assortment management. To further lighten the load on internal IT, about 30 percent of the new applications will be offered on demand in an in-memory cloud. SAP and HP also have been working together to ensure that the platforms use in a converged infrastructure environment will proceed with minimal disruption for IT. The plan also includes working closely with customers to develop purpose-built applications on top of the platform that will benefit from in-memory computing. Equally important, the direction for the HAnA is to be data sourceagnostic, supporting real-time access and replication of data from SAP ERP as well as data integration services for accessing and indexing information from virtually any data source. That appears to be an important capability for companies such as PREMIER Bankcard and its real-time data analytics objectives. Says Pruitt, I think there are a lot of vendors that are kind of myopic, with one technology foundation associated with their services, and if you cant integrate with that, you have to buy a new platform or do adjustments to your systems. I think flexibility and integration are critical. With the HAnA and the access to and analysis of transactional data it supports, the enterprise gets more than a window into its business strategy. It also gains a portal to business success. After all, when a business can have access to more data in real time, what it actually gains is information in context. And when a business has information in context at the right time, it becomes possible to make decisions that can have a profound impact. Thats not just an innovation in analytics. Its also a revolutionone that will help businesses realize so much of what IDgs research shows they want, from timely insight into new opportunities to predicting and quickly responding to customer needs.

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