SAP In-Memory Database and Prescient Travel Safety

Transcription

1 March 7, 2016 CASE STUDY: PRESCIENT AND SAP In-Memory Database Creates New Levels of Employee Safety How SAP HANA Enabled Next-Generation Traveler Safety Applications Holger Mueller Vice President and Principal Analyst Content Editor: R "Ray" Wang Copy Editor: Maria Shao Layout Editor: Aubrey Coggins Produced exclusively for Constellation Research clients

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS AT A GLANCE... 3 THE COMPANY... 4 THE CHALLENGES... 5 THE SOLUTION... 5 THE IMPACT... 7 THE TAKEAWAYS... 7 THE RECOMMENDATIONS... 8 ANALYST BIO... 9 ABOUT CONSTELLATION RESEARCH Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 2

3 AT A GLANCE Traveler safety is more relevant in 2016 than ever. Despite a shift to a digital world, globalization forces enterprises to operate at an increased level worldwide, and that trend is only growing. As a result, enterprises need to dispatch employees more often and farther than ever before into all parts of the world. Prescient Traveler is solving the challenge of identifying the risks employees may be exposed to on their travels. Its modern technology creates Prescient Headquarters: Chicago No. Employees: 107 Industry: Risk Management Revenue: N.A. Ownership: Private Other: Founders and staff from intelligence, federal law enforcement, special operations, software engineering and business communities Website: a next-generation application for traveler safety. Problems Increased global travel needs of enterprises Increased threat scenarios affecting employee safety globally Solutions In-memory threat analysis with SAP HANA Business Themes Safety and Privacy Consumerization of IT Data to Decisions Technology Optimization Dashboard for security stakeholders provides accountability Mobile application for travelers provides situational awareness Benefits Real-time threat analysis and alert system Timely delivery of relevant guidance to employee smartphones Secure communications between mobile and dashboard users 2016 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 3

4 THE COMPANY Cologne, Germany provide a good example. In general, Germany is a safe place to travel Prescient was formed by former professionals in the intelligence, federal law enforcement, special operations, software engineering and business communities. The founding idea was to apply modern technologies to complex business problems in the domains of risk mitigation, due diligence, integrated solutions, training, and research & development. The purpose is to create discrete, and the federal police guards train stations. Public places like train stations have been recommended safety spots for travelers, given the presence of security personnel there. Not New Year s Eve 2015 in Cologne, where large crowds launched assaults and robberies on the public. There was a widespread threat that was developing dynamically as the clock was moving toward midnight. specialized solutions. But it isn t just public unrest that can cause A few quarters ago, the company decided to address the issue of traveler safety, which makes up one of several lines of business. With globalization now going strong after five decades, enterprises need to make sure they don t send people into harm s way. At the same time, they must ensure that employees are accounted for and are aware of what traveler safety concerns. Take, for instance, the fact that usually mild-weathered San Diego recently received its first tornado warning in decades. So an employee vacationing in San Diego, hiking Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve suddenly can become a person to be warned and, if too late, must be accounted for by the employer. threat scenarios may be developing during their travels. Last of all, next to traditional security and weather events, political stability and Recent events have made the need for better traveler safety systems even clearer. developments may change quickly and make travelling employees targets overnight. Recent happenings on New Year s Eve in 2016 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 4

5 THE CHALLENGES time between identification of the risk and provisioning risk management to the analyst Along with the business challenges of traveler and/or traveler. safety, there are significant technology challenges in delivering a travel risk monitoring and alert solution. Here are six of the most prominent ones: 5. Mobile provisioning. Information about risks needs to be propagated to smartphones used by the traveler. 1. Massive data processing. In order to function properly, a traveler safety solution must ingest large amounts of data on the back end. Some of the data may never be used or only used on certain occasions. 6. Right-time information. While underreporting of threats is an obvious risk, overreporting of risks can lead to travelers disregarding important information due to information overflow. 2. Flexible inputs. Data sources need to be added in a lightweight and ad hoc fashion. Analysts may discover new data sources any time and need to add them to the solution easily and reliably. THE SOLUTION The team at Prescient quickly established a Hadoop-based solution as the back end. The team felt this provided the best approach for meeting both the demands of massive 3. Machine and human curation. Data must be curated on an automated level, but also be allowed to be curated by human specialists. data processing and flexible inputs. In fact, building curation applications for analysts and developing a smartphone application for travelers were not trivial parts of the overall 4. Real-time capabilities. Potential risks need to be identified as close to real world system. Fortunately, these known problems came with proven approaches to solving them. happenings as possible, with no loss of 2016 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 5

6 The point of contention quickly came to the machine-based curation of risks and their classification by severity and their attribution to individual travelers. It was clear that these challenges could only be solved through a highly reliable, high throughput database. After a search and some trials, the product team found SAP HANA, SAP s in-memory database. Not only was it able to store risk information, but it also enabled both manual and machinebased curation of risk. As a bonus, HANA s geo-spatial capabilities not only "We could not have implemented our traveler safety system without SAP HANA s in-memory, real time, geospatial and sentiment analysis capabilities. - Mike Bishop Chief System Architect, Prescient allowed for the attribution of risks among each other, but also a highly efficient and in-memory fast attribution of risks to travelers. Moreover, analysts can model elevated threat zones and inform travelers efficiently of their proximity. Any new risks appearing are directly attributed and correlated to other already known risks. Knowing real world distances between different risk events and The Technologies SAP HANA SP11 SAP HANA geospatial capabilities SAP HANA sentiment capabilities Smartphone application episodes is immensely valuable for both the machine-based and human-enabled curation of risks. Finally, the product development team found substantial value in SAP HANA s sentiment analysis. Being able to extract sentiment across multiple languages for text-based ingestion has proven very valuable for both machine-based and human-operated threat curation. Today, SAP HANA can analyze sentiment of an event better as an analyst, as it supports more languages than a human being can master Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 6

7 Today, Prescient has modelled well over 2,000 no-go zones in the world, events are continuously updated, curated and attributed to travelers. Travelers are by default updated THE TAKEAWAYS CxOs can learn a number of things from this case study: on threats every five minutes, a good compromise among privacy intrusion, data transfer volume to the handset, and related battery life implications as well as pragmatic threat and risk management. THE IMPACT Orchestration beats single sourcing. In order to tackle today s system requirements, a single solution from a single vendor cannot provide the complete solution. Prescient uses multiple vendors for building the complete traveler safety solution. A similar capable and affordable solution would not have been possible with a single-sourced technology stack. The system design points and scalability challenges required a real time, in-memorybased solution that only SAP HANA was able to provide to Prescient. As such, SAP HANA is the core of the Prescient Traveler product. Open source is vital. Modern technologies don t come from vendors only, but often from the open source community. Vital With SAP HANA s geospatial capabilities, Prescient analysts now not only can understand potential risks, but automatically architectural building blocks, like the Hadoop-based storage and ingestion system, are based on open source. have real world distances and locations available to make a human-based assessment of risks. In-memory technology is proven and critical. Reliable and scalable in-memory processes as provided by SAP HANA are key for a modern, state-of-the-art application like the featured traveler safety system. Risk 2016 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 7

8 assessment and attribution are only possible at this level with in-memory, real-time processing speeds. As a result, best practices are evolving. No longer would risks be assessed once a day, but at this point they can be assessed on a second by second level. CxOs need to avoid the Technology progress changes business best practice. A solution as created by Prescient would not have been possible 10 years ago and not affordable to apply to this risk management problem three to five years mistake of formulating system requirements based on what s seen in the rear-view mirror. They must take into account newly possible technological capabilities and chart new best practices from there. ago. Progress of technological capabilities enables completely new, previously impossible applications. THE RECOMMENDATIONS CxOs building next-generation applications such as this traveler safety system should consider a number of recommendations. It is clear that SAP HANA is a reliable, inmemory database for sophisticated solutions, such as this traveler safety product. Traveler safety and, in some extreme cases, a traveler s life depends on it. CxOs considering databases for less critical next-generation application use cases should also be comfortable considering and evaluating SAP HANA as a core platform component. First, thinking of next-generation capabilities as a design point is crucial for success. Had the Prescient product team not demanded and kept searching for an in-memory, real-time platform, it may not have found SAP HANA. The result would have been a clearly subpar application. Technological progress enables constant improvement Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 8

9 ANALYST BIO Holger Mueller Vice President and Principal Analyst Holger Mueller is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, providing guidence for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS, with forays up the tech stack into big data, analytics and SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including chief information officers (CIO), chief technology officers (CTO), chief product officers (CPO), investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms and technology buyers. Prior to joining Constellation Research, Holger was VP of products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. He led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new businessprocess-as-a-service (BPaaS) capabilities. Previously, he was the chief application architect with SAP and was also VP of products for FICO. Before that, he worked for Oracle in various management functions - both of the application development (CRM, Fusion) and business development sides. Holger started his careerwith Kiefer & Veittinger, which he helped grow from a startup to Europe s largest CRM vendor from 1995 onwards. Holger has a Diplom Kaufmann from University of Mannheim, with a focus on Information Science, Marketing, International Management and Chemical Technology. As a native European, Mueller speaks six Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 9

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