Image: Memory Bus by ARendle, CC license.

In-memory computing, also known as massively parallel computing, is composed of two things: 1) huge amounts of RAM; and 2) huge amounts of processing power.

In-memory computing is another technology leapfrogging the traditional data warehouse. An in-memory architecture uses data that is in the main memory (also known as Random Access Memory, or RAM) of a computer, rather than data on a hard disk.

Data retrieval from a disk is the slowest part of any analytical query, because the software has to “find and fetch” the data you want, and queries accessing very large amounts of data just can’t be done in a feasible amount of time.

You’ve probably already experienced this. I work with people who launch some SAP queries that take an hour or more to run. These people would like to query even larger amounts of data but don’t even bother trying because they know SAP might just stop in midstream or take so long that the information isn’t worth the effort.

An in-memory setup eliminates “find and fetch” because the data isn’t even stored on a disk; it’s available right there in the main memory of the application, which means it is available for selection and use in your inquiry.

It also means that the way you collect, sort, analyze, chart, use and interpret data should change dramatically – from a fixed and limited process to a more natural and iterative process. The in-memory technology makes it possible to gather information in a way that is a lot like your normal thought process.

Your brain is like an in-memory computer. To make a decision, you first start with the information you have in your head. Then you gather what is missing, using the web, asking questions, reading the newspaper. Your brain immediately processes each new piece of information and sometimes in seconds you’ve made your decision.

This new paradigm – massive data storage connected to super fast computing power – will change what we ask for. No longer will we ask for a report on sales by customer, by date, by region, by product. Instead we will want every single piece of data related to any sale of anything to anyone, say, for the past two years–every single invoice, credit, return, price, discount, the person who sold it, the commission paid on it, the color of the product, the shipment date, delivery data, invoice payment amount, date of payment – everything. This will become the expectation in all areas of an enterprise.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one place to secure this type of environment.  The costs for 20 to 40 terabytes of storage is about the same as the monthly rent of a Manhattan apartment.

Yes, your new fridge can be an internet-enabled Thing, and you can text it to check the beer supply, possibly avoiding a stop on the way home (although, is it possible to have too much beer?)

Alas, which of life’s many difficult hardships will technology eliminate next?  The smart fridge is cool, but it’s about as necessary as a lawn ornament (no offense to law ornament fans).

What about the breakthrough, make-the-world-a-better-place uses for IoT?

In business, I see three promising areas:

Inventory: Good, cheap, durable sensors attached to inventory could cut losses and improve  accuracy.  RFID isn’t good enough in many cases, although that is changing: Airbus uses RFID tags to track thousands of airplane seats and life vests, and a major Japanese clothing retailer has applied RFID tags to everything in its stores, including inventory, hangers, and merchandising displays.

Retail: Already some stores are starting to use sensors to detect when inventory on the shelf is low.  If the trend continues and accuracy is good, this could be a revolution in retail inventory tracking, which is currently done by scanning UPC codes.  As the costs of sensors drops, more and more (lower value) products can be included in this type of solution.  Some hotel mini-bars now sense when items are consumed, eliminating the need to count, write down, and key in how many drinks and snacks a hotel guest had. 

Machinery diagnostics: For complex production lines that are difficult to keep running at top performance for long periods, IoT sensors could continually measure and transmit machine parameters, output, speed, consistency of cycles, and other variables to create a visual record of performance that could then be correlated with unplanned downtime; cause and effect could more easily be determined and machine performance improved.

PINC Solutions, Inc. markets connected sensors and software for managing truck fleets at plants and distribution centers.  It is a straightforward, practical application of IoT: trucks have RFID sensors that uniquely identify them; trucks are attached via software to delivery numbers, dock doors, destinations, and other information via a giant virtual whiteboard.

The benefits here are easy to understand: measure & reduce wait times at pickup and delivery points, reduce idling and searching in a yard full of trucks for the one you need, and provide real-time on-the-road status and ETA.

For more on this topic, check out this IoT primer published by Goldman Sachs.

For more articles like this, visit my site at softwaremoneypit.com.

Photo by Blake Patterson, CC license.

See those app icons on your iPhone? Don’t you think it makes sense to put corporate apps on an iPhone too? Yes, as long as the interface is easy and you don’t have to type a lot on your tiny glass screen. Enterprise apps are going there, and that means the desktop/laptop is moving into the palm of your hand.

This is a good thing, and it’s not just about convenience. There are sales to be made. Employees in customer- and partner-facing roles want the superior capabilities of Apple or Android products to enhance their selling stories or engage on a different and more dynamic level with customers, partners, banks, and the general public. Seeing is believing, and only mobile computing brings that to the field in an effective way.

To capitalize on mobile, you need software on the device and a way for the device to reach your enterprise systems. The apps that check you in for your flight are programs made to run on an iOS or Android device, which then connect over the digital network to an interface mechanism that is the connection to the airline’s main reservation system.  It is not difficult for your enterprise to do the same; there are many firms that can build apps and also provide the integration to your ERP systems.

But most of the mobile-platform software needed will be custom.  Enterprise software vendors are starting to offer mobile versions for small parts of their entire system solution. SAP says its Retail Execution mobile app works with its enterprise customer relationship management software to provide “anywhere, anytime access to data from mobile devices….”

Oracle offers Business Approval for Managers, a Smartphone app to approve expenses, purchase orders and other pending transactions.

Mobile also offers the promise of a totally new interaction with your ERP system. Out of the box, basic transactions – like determining quantities of raw materials required and placing a purchase order for those quantities – is a multiple-screen, multiple data entry affair for the leading ERP systems.

As your business grows or becomes more complex, you need good ERP system jockeys, and more of them. But a mobile app is the perfect consolidator of unnecessary steps. A PO creation in your ERP system that is three screens and eight fields of data entry could be simplified to four taps on two screens.

I believe that many enterprises have or will eventually realize that a large part of their work force is devoted to feeding systems like Oracle and ERP the data those systems need to create transactions, reports, and messages needed to keep the business running.  And many times that data has to be created in Excel or other systems, in order to give the classic ERP system the pristine data it needs. This is a gross misuse of talent, and can only go on so long.

I have seen smart young SAP users figure out how to automate the in-feeds needed for everyday transactions.  They are resourcing what they know to make their life simpler, and much of what they do is exactly what mobile apps do — consolidate steps in a transaction.

The mobile app is the model — simplicity and intuition — that big ERP vendors need to invest in.

Image: “Data Center.” by Stan Wlechers, CC license

So what is Big Data, particularly Big Data analytics? Why all the hype?

Big Data is what it implies: tons of data. We’re talking millions or billions of rows here – way too much for standard query tools accessing data on a disk.

What would constitute “tons” of data? Every bottle of “spring,” “purified” or “mineral” water that was scanned at a grocery store checkout during the month of July 2011; the brand, the price, the size, the name and location of the store, and the day of the week it was bought. That’s six pieces of data, multiplied by the estimated 3.3 billion bottles of water sold monthly in the United States.

Big Data analytics is the process of extracting meaning from all that data.

The analysis of big data is made possible by two developments:

1) The continuation of Moore’s law; that is, computer speed and memory have multiplied exponentially. This has enabled the processing of huge amounts of data without retrieving that data from disk storage; and

2) “Distributed” computing structures such as Hadoop have made it possible for the processing of large amounts of data to be done on multiple servers at once.

The hype you read about Big Data may be justified. Big data does have potential and should not be ignored. With the right software, a virtual picture of the data can be painted with more detail than ever before. Think of it as a photograph, illustration or sketch – with every additional line of clarification or sharpening of detail, the picture comes more into focus.

Michael Malone, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says that some really big things might be possible with big data:

“It could mean capturing every step in the path of every shopper in a store over the course of a year, or monitoring every vital sign of a patient every second for the course of his illness….Big data offers measuring precision in science, business, medicine and almost every other sector never before possible.”

But should your enterprise pursue Big Data analytics? It may already have. If your company processes millions of transactions or has millions of customers, you have a lot of data to begin with.

You need three things to enable Big Data analytics:

1. A way to get the data, whether out of your transaction systems or from external sources, and into a database. Typically this is done with ETL or Extract, Transform, and Load software tools such as Informatica. Jobs are set up and the data is pulled every hour, day, etc., put into a file and either pushed or pulled into a storage environment.
2. Superfast data processing. Today, an in-memory database (a database with enormous amounts of RAM and massively parallel processing) can be acquired and used on a software-as-service basis from Amazon Web Services at a very reasonable cost.
3. User interface analytics tools that present the data in the visual form you prefer. Vendors include Oracle, Teradata, Tableau, Information Builders, Qlikview, Hyperion, and many others. The market here is moving toward data visualization via low-cost, software-as-a-service tools that allow you to aggregate disparate sources of data (internal and external systems, social media, and public sources like weather and demographic statistics.

Photo: “Trails in the Sand,” Dubai, by Kamal Kestell, CC license

If “Humanscale” computing is managing bags of sand, “Hyperscale” computing is managing each individual grain of sand in every bag.

“Hyperscale” computing (HC) is the processing of data, messages or transactions on a scale orders of magnitude larger than traditional computing.  HC is becoming a need for many businesses.  Why?

Consider a company that sells bottled water.  Its main business used to be selling truckloads full of cases of water to big grocery chains.  It has 25 different products, or Stock Keeping Units (SKUs).  The big grocery chains then distributed cases of water to its stores, which numbered 20,000.  The data requirements for the water company’s computers was manageable, even as the company grew rapidly.

Now, the company wants to analyze the performance of its products on store shelves by measuring things like velocity (how fast the product turns), price compared to competing products, and out-of-stocks.  It’s customers — the big grocery chains — are offering to supply data from their systems on every scan of every product in every store, because they too want to improve the performance of products on the shelf.

In one month during the summer, about 3.5 billion bottles of water are sold.  A data file from just one big grocery chain runs to 3 million lines.  How and where will you process this data?  Traditional databases will be too slow.  You will need superfast databases that distribute computing to many servers — this is called in-memory, or massively parallel computing.  This is an example of hyperscale computing.

Other examples where you would need HC: selling direct to consumers through their smartphones, where you might have to process millions of transactions say, during the Christmas holiday season; gathering machine data every second to monitor a machine’s performance (a General Electric turbofan jet engine generates 5,000 data points per second, which amounts to 30 terabytes every 30 minutes); and managing millions of product-attribute combinations.

The computing tools for hyperscale will not be found in your ERP system.  Trying to engineer your existing systems to handle hyperscale data and transactions will be a costly failure.  But there are tools available on the market today, and many of them are found in cloud applications, and in application hosting providers.

Cloud application and hosting vendors usually have much larger data processing capabilities, including automatic failover and redundant servers.  You can take advantage of this capacity.  For example, you can obtain, from a leading application hosting provider, at a cost less than the monthly rent of an apartment in New York City, 30 terabytes of storage and a massively parallel computing environment.

My advice:

• Identify areas of your business that are significantly under-scaled, or where you have large gaps in business needs compared to processing capability;
• Pick one and design a pilot project (many vendors are willing to do this with you at very low cost);
• Measure results and benefits, and if beneficial, expand the solution to other parts of your business.

It’s probably not OK to ignore this trend.  Even of you don’t need HC today, think about the future and where commerce is going.  If you don’t gain the capability for hyperscale computing, one or more of your competitors probably will.

Image: all of the two- and four-door model cars offered by Dodge in 1974 (excludes station wagons), by John Lloyd, CC license.

It used to be that if you wanted a certain type of software application, you would identify the 2 or 3 companies that specialized in what you needed. That specialization still exists today, but the picture is becoming more and more blurred.

You will find that many software vendors are trying to grow beyond their core expertise by claiming their solutions can also handle other functions within an enterprise.

As an example, consider software firm Enterprise 21, whose advertising places it firmly in the category of manufacturing: “Discover Enterprise 21 Manufacturing Software Solutions.”

But its advertising also includes this claim: “Enterprise 21, however, is more than a stand-alone manufacturing software system – Enterprise 21 is a fully-integrated ERP system that encompasses order management, inventory management, procurement, RF and barcode-enabled warehouse management, advanced forecasting and planning, CRM, business intelligence, and e-Commerce functionality. All transactions and processes in manufacturing are directly linked to all other business departments and units throughout the enterprise with a single database to deliver vital, real-time business information.”

What to do with this information, that this package can also replace systems for other functions? Some applications can, and some truly cannot. It’s quite possible Enterprise 21’s solution is a good fit for some companies for multiple functions.
My experience with these types of claims is that:

• While a package can indeed perform other functions, it is likely to do so with limited features because the ancillary features are not what the firm has spent years developing and improving, unlike the core features of the application.
• There are usually other vendors that specialize in or have spent years developing applications in those other functions the vendor has expanded into.
• If you just want the core functionality that the application was originally designed for, you’ll need to determine how to use just that portion of the solution while integrating it with the rest of your enterprise’s software.

Determine the scope of what you need – that scope that gives you the bulk of the benefits you want. From there you can incrementally determine in an incremental way whether the added value of expanding the software’s footprint is worth the added cost and time of implementing it.

Image by Aucitron, CC license

Cloud computing is being marketed as something new, but it’s not. A cloud is simply a server – a computer you don’t own or maintain – that sits somewhere other than in your building, that you access to run applications or store data. The loan calculators that are ubiquitous on the web run in a cloud that you access via the internet. Data backup services run in the cloud, as do other web tools such as Dropbox and Google Drive.

In fact, cloud computing, technically speaking, can be considered as any software you access that is functioning outside your desktop computer and outside any server that is physically on your company’s premises or within your company’s security firewall.

If you read an ad that says: “Get more out of your data with business intelligence in the cloud,” it could be a vendor selling a SaaS application, database hosting services, or both.

Companies with limited IT resources should always consider a cloud solution. What is new in cloud applications is an expanded range of products and services – today some companies can run nearly their entire business in a cloud environment.

Instead of investing millions in a traditional on-site suite of integrated applications for sales, accounting, logistics and human resources, companies can securely access these solutions as if they were residing on a server inside their building, but without the cost and maintenance of on-premise applications.

Enterprises using cloud applications also do not need to employ a staff of experts to maintain, troubleshoot and periodically upgrade the server(s) or software – all of that is managed by the cloud application provider.

The cloud is made possible by high-speed internet connections and the huge decrease in the cost of computer processing and memory over the past decade. Stronger security methods have also contributed to the growth of the cloud, although some companies are still hesitant to trust a third party with their sensitive corporate data.

Inexpensive cloud applications are available if you can run your business with standard, non-customized applications. Enterprises can access what is called a multi-tenant version of the software – where several companies use the same software, but whose transactions and data are separated from one another by functioning in a different location or “node” of the software. This scenario is also effectively software-as-a-service (SaaS), because you don’t own the software, the vendor does, and you are simply renting it by paying a periodic access fee or a fee based on number of transactions or users.

Another option is for your enterprise to own its own customized software, but outsource the hosting of it on one or more servers and networks. This model has been around for years – many companies outsource the hosting of their applications to data centers. This is why cloud computing, for all its hype, is nothing new.

In many cases I think traditional ERP is becoming more and more unnecessary.

I don’t mean that the concept of ERP is become unnecessary, just the traditional ERP on the traditional platform as we have known it for the past 15 years. In the future I imagine the following trends will bring about this prediction:

• Enterprises will no longer be willing to spend huge sums for year(s)-long projects where they end up owning, hosting and caring for software that requires upgrades every 18 to 24 months, not to mention the expense and management of IT staff to support the data center, integrations, system backups and nonstop user demand for new features and changes to the software.
• Organizations will trend away from capital investments in software and toward paying for software as an operating expense. This is because: 1) a large capital project is much harder to sell than a relatively small long-term increase in operating expense; 2) associating software expense directly to the function that uses it is a better accounting practice; 3) in an ROI calculation, the added operating expense of a SaaS model only has to be offset by yearly savings brought about by the new application, instead of requiring that three or so years of annual savings pay for the entire cost of the new system.
• The software market will continue to offer new products and services that, while not a complete ERP system, could replace large components of an on-premise ERP.
• Companies will begin to piece together “point” solutions – single-purpose applications – in the cloud as SaaS solutions. By networking their applications in the cloud, they will achieve better functionality, far greater flexibility and lower cost than a traditional ERP system

This trend is not where the big ERP software vendors want to go. To them, the traditional model is quite profitable enough, thank you.

So there is opportunity for you.

• Identify the parts of your enterprise that gain the most from new software solutions
• Identify the information or transaction flows that must be integrated to realize the full value of your project
• Concentrate on software that helps you achieve 1) and 2); if it is a full ERP system then so be it, but I think the value can be isolated and realized in those important areas without making the huge investment a traditional ERP project requires.