Recently we wrote about how millennials are driving cloud adoption. Since they are impatient about latencies, you could also call them the real-time generation. But real time is not only for the millennials, enterprises are figuring out. We are now into what’s called the digital economy, the new way of doing business for all enterprises, traditional or digital. Why? There’s no time to lose, in this digital economy. Waiting for a few days for a key business report to be generated doesn’t serve the enterprise very well. Invoicing now has to be in real time, not 15-20 minutes later. IT infrastructure uptime means uptime in real-time, not after 10 minutes of a server crash. Ten minutes isn’t good enough. Near real-time isn’t good enough. Only real-time will do. And that’s the trend for 2016 that we see. The SAP HANA shift: Now that ERP in real time has been made possible with in-memory computing championed by SAP HANA, we expect several businesses to make the move to HANA cloud. With the premise of super fast processing, HANA is helping enterprises reimagine business models, adopt big data and the Internet of Things, run insights-led businesses, and drive innovation. The majority of SAP HANA implementations will come as upgrades from older versions of SAP. But there will be a small share of mid-size businesses that will take the ERP route, the SAP HANA way. And that share is set to grow by the end of the year. One of Progression’s clients, an auto components manufacturing company, has moved to SAP HANA on a hosted private cloud at our data center. And the organization is seeing some great gains in terms of ‘real time’ business. Six-monthly reports that would take over 24 hours to be collated by their older ERP system are now ready within 20 minutes! Backups would take 12-15 hours in their older setup; with SAP HANA it’s down to 1.5 hours! Online transactions are also now noticeably faster. Here’s a manufacturing business now running in real time! 
Mid-size enterprises will be more real-time than large behemoths: Mid-size enterprises hungry for growth are not going to wait on the sidelines for technologies to mature or new business models to consolidate and streamline. They are nimble and quicker to adopt new technologies which enable them to be real-time. From trying to run IT inhouse to fearlessly exploring cloud models with stringent managed services, from handling legacy applications to leaping straight into setting up greenfield HANA implementations, mid-size enterprises are leveraging their nimbleness to garner new differentiators, unprecedented speed and technological leadership to enable stupendous growth. Real-time View of IT Infra: Once all these real-time technologies and infrastructure come into play, enterprises will now need real-time view of their IT infrastructure. For now, most IT heads get alerts on SMS and mail, or through online dashboards accessed on desktops. But is this real-time enough? When IT heads can have the IT infrastructure view right in their mobile through an app that gives visual data trends, real-time data on a host of performance indicators, they stop being dependent on canned SMS alerts and red flags. An app is all they need to know the health of the IT infrastructure. And that is a lot less intrusion, and a lot more control. This is the year IT systems are truly going real time in a big way. All you need is the right IT infrastructure, the right team driven by a whatever IT takes attitude to get going. How can you go real-time with IT infrastructure this year? Speak to us here.
