The Power of Instant Customer Insight

Transcription

1 The Power of Instant Customer Insight Medtronic dramatically improved reporting performance, increasing the value of its customer information, with the SAP HANA platform and Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) server platform. Customer Innovation Brief Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) SAP HANA Platform January 2012 Version 1.0 Introduction Like many businesses across industry segments, medical device maker Medtronic, Inc. continually strives to find ways to take full advantage of a data store that is rapidly growing in both volume and diversity of data. In fact, the company s data warehouse has doubled in size within the past few years, and that pace of growth is expected to continue. Adding to the complexity of interpreting that data, much of the information being added to the data store each day is unstructured data, such as text-based entries about products and customers, rather than structured data such as statistics that can be more easily correlated with each other. This growing body of unstructured data was straining the performance and scalability limits of the company s business intelligence (BI) computing infrastructure. Medtronic is excited to have SAP and Cisco, two global technology leaders, to help us address and solve a host of challenges that our ever increasing data landscape presents. SAP HANA on Cisco UCS has the potential to fundamentally change how we examine our business while providing us the critical insights we need to meet and surpass our customer s expectations. - Steve Teichman, IT Director for Business Intelligence, Medtronic Solution provided by:

2 Contents Introduction... 1 Challenge...2 Solution...2 Customer Benefit....2 Medtronic Customer Data Opportunities and Challenges... 3 SAP HANA Platform Innovation Handles Massive Data in Real Time... 4 Cisco UCS Streamlines Data Center Operations... 5 Conclusion... 6 Medtronic places a very high value on customer feedback, and that value is reflected in the sophistication of its systems built specifically to manage and interpret customer complaints, using the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application and the other solutions already in place. Medtronic recognized the potential for the SAP HANA platform to revolutionize its BI operations by dramatically driving up performance. For that reason, Medtronic investigated the use of the SAP HANA platform on the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) a complete, unified data center environment. Challenge: Medtronic needed to increase its ability to analyze large amounts of data, such as customer feedback. BI reporting on its fast-growing data warehouse was straining the capabilities of the company s computer infrastructure. Because employees couldn t generate some types of reports (particularly using unstructured data), their ability to draw conclusions from existing data was limited. Solution: The company deployed the SAP HANA platform on the Cisco UCS server platform based on the Intel Xeon processor E7 family. In preliminary testing, users of an untuned system observed query times just one-third as long as those with existing production systems. With the fully scaled and optimized implementation now in place, Medtronic hopes to cut response times even further. Customer Benefit: BI operations at Medtronic will use the SAP HANA platform to report on structured and unstructured data, wherever it resides, whether on SAP or non-sap systems. The added performance, scalability, and flexibility of this new architecture will increase the value of company data as it continues to proliferate, increasing employee efficiency and enabling smarter decision making. 2 The Power of Instant Customer Insight

3 SAP AND CISCO POWER FAST, SUCCESSFUL DEPLOYMENT When Medtronic engineers decided to pursue a pilot program with the SAP HANA platform on Cisco UCS, they engaged with SAP and Cisco, both of which sent staff to work onsite at Medtronic. Only about 20 weeks elapsed between the day Medtronic took delivery of the first server until the SAP HANA platform environment was in full production: On June 1, the first server arrived at Medtronic, which was set up in a lab environment for preliminary testing. On July 1, the company took delivery of five more servers, which were deployed in two separate locations for more comprehensive testing. By October 16, the environment went live with development, test, and production operations underway. A collaborative implementation between the three companies allowed for successful integration with SAP and non-sap data sources in a very aggressive timeframe. Cisco and SAP remain dedicated to producing similar results with future customers. To learn more, contact SAPonCisco@cisco.com. Medtronic Customer Data Opportunities and Challenges As a core element of company strategy, Medtronic invests a tremendous amount of energy in gathering and tracking customer feedback. Everything from a formal regulatory report to a casual conversation between an employee and a family member as long as it pertains to a Medtronic product finds its way into the company s customer-complaint registration system. That dedication to thoroughness and detail has created a valuable data resource as the volume of that data has risen exponentially. The true value of the customercomplaint data lies in the ability to find within it correlations and relationships. Those patterns enable company analysts to identify opportunities for product improvement and innovation. Along with that opportunity comes the corresponding challenge of analyzing the very large body of data. Moreover, maximum value comes from the ability to cross-compare information in the complaint-registration system with other data sources. To realize its goal of being able to report on all these data sources together, Medtronic took a multifaceted approach: Centralization. Reporting on data from all over the company requires the important first step of bringing that data together into a central location, where possible. As part of that effort, Medtronic s global complaint-handling initiative is migrating customer feedback from all business units worldwide into SAP CRM. Correlation. More consistent, comprehensive reporting will be possible from the customercomplaint data once it is all in SAP CRM and can be correlated with other systems, such as a non-sap CRM system that contains each product s registration data and the SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application that contains sales data. Analysis. Discerning patterns within the massive collection of data from multiple sources was simply beyond the capabilities of existing hardware and software systems. In particular, the conventional database was slow in reading and writing to disk and had limited scalability. Medtronic is addressing this challenge using the SAP HANA platform. As an early adopter of the SAP HANA platform, however, Medtronic was far from having to chart its own course. The company s IT architects got comprehensive help from SAP on the integration of the SAP HANA platform with both SAP and non-sap data sources all over the company. Bringing together all that data into the SAP HANA platform as if it were a central repository is one of the core capabilities that led Medtronic to implement the platform, and early indications suggest that the effort will indeed be a success. Medtronic deployed the SAP HANA platform on Cisco UCS server platforms, and from the first time Medtronic users tried out the preproduction systems, they were pleased with what they found. Steve Teichman, IT director for business intelligence at Medtronic, said, Application users at The Power of Instant Customer Insight 3

4 Medtronic have very high performance and quality expectations, and we are focused on trying to achieve a single source of truth solution for reporting. Response times with the SAP HANA platform were roughly one-third what the company would have experienced with the previous systems, which enables users to improve their efficiency and effectiveness. SAP HANA Platform Innovation Handles Massive Data in Real Time The SAP HANA platform addresses the need for real-time decision support with in-memory database technology. This approach stores a complete copy of data in system memory, eliminating the previous system s slowness in reading from and writing to disk. Using the SAP HANA platform, queries can often be performed much faster than on the systems they replace. The big-data challenges that companies such as Medtronic are addressing require both brute strength to crunch lots of numbers and intelligent flexibility that can reach into diverse data silos to create integration and interoperation that didn t exist before. Specific goals that the SAP HANA platform helps address include the following: Addressing business pressures. Rising levels of competitiveness are a fact of life, and businesses must find ways to accelerate decision making that s based on the best information available. Handling demands for innovation. Taking advantage of the latest business applications demands speed, flexibility, and scalability. Solving the need for integration. New systems must work smoothly with existing ones, with the ideal goal of not only integrating the new with the old, but also enhancing interoperation among existing systems. The SAP HANA platform s outstanding performance is the foundation of its in-memory operation. As computer systems have become more capable of very high levels of raw transactional throughput, the relatively slow process of disk reads and writes has become a significant impediment to fast, database-driven operations. At the same time, the shift to 64-bit computing has removed the 4 GB-per-server limitation on system memory. Taking advantage of the very high levels of addressable system memory in today s server platforms, the SAP HANA platform stores a full copy of business data in active memory so it is immediately available for BI applications. Therefore, it is not necessary, under normal circumstances, for the SAP HANA platform to read data from disk before a computation or to write it back afterward. That factor cuts latency dramatically, enabling real-time analytics. Because interoperation with any type of data source is a key tenet of the SAP HANA platform s design, the cost, effort, and time needed to implement the platform in an existing environment are optimized. Moreover, since the system supports ad hoc reporting to meet changing business needs, users can typically obtain the analysis they need by themselves instead of requiring IT to create costly, specialized reports. The SAP HANA platform s flexible, cost-effective approach for managing large data volumes can dramatically reduce the hardware and maintenance costs associated with multiple data warehouses and analytical systems. As the SAP HANA platform becomes the foundation for a growing body of new, innovative business applications, it will create additional value for customers. The Expanding Range of SAP HANA Platform Implementations As more companies across industries adopt the SAP HANA platform, the breadth of its value becomes even more apparent. Scenarios in various operational areas continue to demonstrate the value of real-time data analytics: Order management and supplychain logistics. Efficient supply and demand planning, volume management, transportation, and pricing Manufacturing and production. Improved planning, volume management, asset and personnel utilization, and performance management Operational intelligence and efficiency. Optimized sales and marketing analytics, trade-promotion management, budgeting, and IT strategy 4 The Power of Instant Customer Insight

5 Cisco UCS Streamlines Data Center Operations The Cisco UCS infrastructure that hosts SAP HANA platform implementations includes a highquality set of components engineered to deliver excellent results together. Building on SAP HANA platform optimization for the Intel Xeon processor, Cisco UCS adds additional layers of tuning for performance and scalability. With SAP HANA, we saw an opportunity to provide a very innovative server platform and combine it with SAP s leadingedge technology in the areas of ERP and analytics. -Satinder Sethi, VP Engineering, Cisco Systems The Unified Fabric in Cisco UCS also removes the need for multiple sets of connections (including server adapters, cables, and switch ports) for different traffic types. Instead, the system uses parent fabric interconnects that centrally manage and process traffic for simple, high-performance networking with fewer points of management. Adding components or making other changes can also be accomplished without adapter installation or cabling. The SAP HANA platform in-memory operation benefits dramatically from the presence of very large amounts of system memory. The Intel Xeon processor E7 family is designed to support up to a 2-terabtye memory footprint on a four-way server. Many customers configuring Cisco UCS for the SAP HANA platform elect to provision large amounts of memory with 4-gigabyte (GB) DIMMs, which cost significantly less per GB than 16-GB modules. The resulting lower system cost adds further to the overall value of the SAP HANA platform. Very early in the development process, engineers at SAP and Intel began collaborating to optimize the SAP HANA platform for the Intel Xeon processor. This activity was an extension of the ongoing coengineering relationship between the two companies that stretches back more than a decade. As a result of this collaborative effort, the combination of the SAP HANA platform and Cisco UCS exhibits excellent performance, scalability, and stability. The SAP HANA platform also benefits from advanced reliability features of the Intel Xeon processor E7 family that help protect missioncritical data. This future-ready technology offers a significant design win for IT departments as they deliver easy adoption, flexibility, and ongoing cost savings. Businesses can achieve a new range of competitive advantages from game-changing advances that are superior to anything that came before: Analyze massive data stores in fractions of a second. Instantaneous access to company data enables immediate decisions based on maximum intelligence that scales smoothly to large numbers of servers. Respond in real time to data as it develops. Detailed responses to realtime data are possible with minimal latency and without the need for time-consuming data aggregation. Lower costs while building performance. Dramatic, costeffective results are accompanied by efficiencies that become even more pronounced as data sizes continue to increase. Together, the SAP HANA platform and Cisco UCS can accelerate time to deployment and productivity, as well as extend business value. The Power of Instant Customer Insight 5

6 Conclusion As the pace of change quickens, businesses increasingly thrive or fail based on how well they can adapt to shifting market environments. The ability to respond instantly to business data and to continually fine-tune operations have become strategic imperatives in many aspects of business. In pursuit of the competitive advantage, Cisco and SAP identify a three-part assertion of benefits for the SAP HANA platform running on Cisco UCS: Run Bolder. Deploy game-changing innovation to enable mixed workloads of analytics, operations, and performance management in a single system for innovative new business applications. Run Simpler. Streamline the IT landscape and reduce total cost of ownership with technology that s groundbreaking yet non-disruptive to existing landscapes and simple to deploy, without compromise. Run Smarter. Make smarter, faster business decisions supported by increased visibility, real-time analysis, and reporting on very large volumes of business information. With this game-changing innovation, companies such as Medtronic are able to respond with greater agility than ever before to emerging business data. Smarter decisions will follow. Learn more about the Cisco Unified Computing System: Learn more about SAP HANA: Learn more about Medtronic: Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco s trademarks can be found at Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company SAP AG. All rights reserved. SAP, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, Duet, PartnerEdge, ByDesign, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, StreamWork, and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Crystal Decisions, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius, and other Business Objects products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects Software Ltd. Business Objects is an SAP company. Sybase and Adaptive Server, ianywhere, Sybase 365, SQL Anywhere, and other Sybase products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sybase, Inc. Sybase is an SAP company. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data contained in this document serves informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary. These materials are subject to change without notice. These materials are provided by SAP AG and its affiliated companies ( SAP Group ) for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and SAP Group shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to the materials. The only warranties for SAP Group products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.