Solving “Unsolvable” Problems

On day two of SAPPHIRE NOW, Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe appealed to customers to create a more sustainable future. SAP will help them do it.



Tracking the progress of technology over SAP’s 40-year history is a humbling retrospective. The year of the company’s founding, 1972, was also the last year the Apollo program sent a human to the moon. The guidance system in that spacecraft consisted of a computer with 32 kilobytes of main memory, approximately half of what one would find in today’s musical birthday cards.

SAP was in business several years before it could acquire its first computer. The unit was a colossal Siemens mainframe, with two megabytes of main memory, the average size of an e-mail attachment today.

“Who would have imagined in 1972,” Jim Hagemann Snabe asked, “that 40 years later you would be able to hold in a phone a multi-core computer with more than 64 gigabytes of main memory, a GPS navigation system, a high definition camera, a video conferencing system, and an electronic wallet in one device that fits in your pocket …without changing the size of your pocket.”

The next 40 years will host even more extreme developments, Hagemann Snabe showed, with the world’s population going from seven to nine billion people by 2052. In China, an estimated 250 million people will move from rural areas into cities. Urban areas will increase by one million square kilometers, an area roughly the size of France, Germany, and Spain combined. The 60-plus population will triple, and for the first time in history outnumber children.

These changes will have massive ramifications for business and society and present great challenges. “Imagine the impact this has on healthcare, on housing, on labor, on pensions, on taxation,” Hagemann Snabe said. There’s also the strain on the earth’s natural resources to consider.

But the future is not set in stone, Hagemann Snabe argued, and SAP believes it can help customers and society to rise to the challenges to come. Technology will continue to progress, providing the base for innovation that plays a major role in creating a more sustainable future. “The choices we make today have a significant impact on the tomorrow we create,” Hagemann Snabe said.

Source : http://en.sap.info/ceo-sapphire-now-snabe-cloud-inmemory/73078

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