SAP Bids to Become “Facebook of Enterprise”

When enterprise employees connect, the businesslike LinkedIn is the obvious forum for social activity. In reality, however, Facebook is the most popular platform even though it is not really geared for business, which makes it vulnerable to a more effective competitor.

In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, SAP’s vice president for cloud marketing, Dinesh Sharma, postulates the intriguing idea that his company through the cloud could be the one to grab the enterprise social function. The strategy is based on two main factors.

The first is SAP’s HANA which shifts processing into memory, massively accelerating the way multiple data sources can be queried. The other is SuccessFactors, acquired last December, which organizes peoples’ career portfolios online.

Picture if you will a talent management worker in the human resources department of a major enterprise. On her tablet is a tool that would let her search for multiple people throughout the workforce who would be best suited to work together as a team on a collective project, sorted in order by their estimated availability and proximity to the place of business. The tool would have to judge these workers’ interest and attitudes based on such factors as what they tweet, what products they’ve liked on Facebook and what tech news stories they’ve commented on. Even with the best database management schemes in the world, it would be quite a considerable query, consuming tremendous resources and time.

HANA, however, could cope claims Mr. Sharma.

SAP’s Sharma points out that the common usage model for applications preferred by folks in college or emerging from it today is tremendously different from the usage model of 2000—the key difference being the social component. Any new functionality delivered to that customer—the ones entering the workforce with the skills that talent managers want most—must be geared toward interoperability and shareability. It cannot sit on a hard drive.


Source: WSJ


http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2012/05/30/sap-bids-to-become-facebook-of-enterprise/?mod=google_news_blog