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More than ever, the ability to constantly innovate and re-invent ones business models and products makes the difference between those companies who are successful and those who disappear. The times are gone, that market shares could be cemented or protected by sheer dominance of a market or by classical marketing strategies. Local markets are progressively becoming merely a segment of the global market and every business, regardless of how local it may feel, has to face global competition. This is also true for China, where many companies have become global and are viable competitors for long established multinationals, even in their home markets. At the same time, with the opening of China as a market, most Chinese companies are facing tough competition through global companies too.
This competition can be fought through pricing, branding or access to distribution, but it will be finally decided who are the most flexible and innovative players. This is where SAP has a crucial role to play, as it enables companies through its most advanced software solutions, to react quickly to changes in demand, the market conditions or the customer behavior. Today, it is out most important to observe essential trends early enough – and at times we even need to predict certain changes in order to place significant investment and innovation resources on the right trends. Therefore world-class business intelligence tools are necessary; not only to analyze the past, but further to make the right prediction. Another important paradigm is speed. Decision must be made quickly and software needs to be able to analyze billions of data-sets within seconds to make business leaders having the right information in the right moment without delay. SAP HANA, which is SAP's in-memory data base product, is the world's leading and fastest technology to read and analyze data. What we call “Big Data” is of course not only for “big companies” – every company is facing an enormous amount of internal and external information, that need to be processed. Consumer behavior is analyzed out of millions of statements in the internet, product reputation can be derived from microblogs or the DNA of a single person. Combined with the unique SAP business intelligence, SAP Business Objects, SAP is clearly a world market leader enabling its customers to innovate faster than ever before.
Obviously, the information needs to be available at the right place. On that account we talk about mobility and cloud. There is no doubt, that the way how we access and store data today has tremendously changed in the recent past. Today, China is the world's leading country when it comes to mobility, smart phone usage and internet access through mobile phones. Besides, in the area of cloud, China will make significant efforts to open this important market for global and local players alike.
Given those trends, it is important that every software engineer, every project manager in business and every student in the IT-field is updating him/herself constantly about the latest and most important trends and technologies in the fields of cloud, mobile, in-memory and business analytics. SAP is the company that is best positioned to provide insights not only into the latest technologies in these fields, but also business relevance that is uniquely combined with the technologies.
Practitioners from SAP Labs China are writing this book series and no-one than our own engineers, project managers and software architects would be in a better position to give deep insights into the latest technology trends, based on SAP's offerings in this context.
Enjoy the reading!
Senior Vice President, Head of SAP Labs Network,
Head of the Fast Growth Markets Organization
Clas Neumann