sapiuc Archives - GreenMonk: the blog

I attended the International SAP for Utilities event in Mannheim recently. This was the fourth SAP for Utilities event I have attended and it was by far the best. This was the first time I was attending the event as a speaker, not just an analyst and that may well have coloured my opinion of the event, but I don’t think so, to be honest. Why?

Well, there were two main take-aways for me from the event

There was a much higher focus on renewables and
There was a lot of discussion of in-memory computing

And neither of those had anything to do with the topic of my own talk (The New Power of the Customer’s Voice).

I knew I was in for an interesting conference when the opening keynote was from Joschka Fischer. Fischer used his keynote to make a blistering attack on the nuclear industry. Fischer, the former German vice-chancellor and Foreign Minister said “we must say goodbye to nuclear energy – it is not safe, and we don’t know the costs”. He went on to state that Germany “is going to phase out of nuclear energy”. Bear in mind that many of the utilities who were in the room would have significant nuclear plants in their generation fleet.

What will Germany use to replace its nuclear power? Renewables and energy efficiency will be key, he said. Germany will need super grids and a smart grid with gas as a backup technology (from diverse regions because, he said, Russia is not a reliable source).

In his opening keynote, Klaus Heimann, apart from talking up two new SAP Energy Management products, declared that “more than ever before we wish we could generate all of our electricity from renewables” and he went on to assert that “if we spent our resources learning how to capture and store natural power, we’d be in a very different place now”.

And this was the first two talks of the conference!

SAP Research director Orestis Terzidis

Scarcely a talk went by without some reference to renewables – understandable given that this was taking place in the immediate aftermath of the Fukashima nuclear disaster.

The most data-rich talk on renewables, perhaps not surprisingly, came from Orestis Terzidis, VP SAP Research EMEA. He referenced peer-reviewed research throughout his presentation to make his case that large-scale wind, water and solar systems can reliably supply all of the world’s energy needs at reasonable cost.

Interestingly, on the renewables front SAP has put its money where its mouth is. From SAP’s independently verified Sustainability Report you can see that SAP increased its purchase of renewable energy from 16% in 2009 to 48% in 2010.

Nice – obviously 100% would be better than the current 48% but renewables are not available for purchase in all geographies. Yet.

The other core topic heavily referenced in the event was in-memory computing (In-memory computing moves data off traditional storage and into RAM, providing a performance boost over reading data off disks).

Given that utility companies deploying smart grids will be moving from a maximum of one meter read per month to a situation where they will have more data coming from smart meters (more data fields) and coming in more often (one read every 15 minutes means around 2,880 reads per month), utilities are about to face in influx of data like they have never seen before.

In-memory computing is a natural fit for performing any kind of real-time analytics on this tidal-wave of data. Not surprising then that one of SAP’s first in-memory products is going to be a Smart Meter Analytics for Utilities solution.

The next SAP for Utilities event will be the US one this coming September in San Antonio. Given that this one was so good – the pressure is really on conference organisers The Eventful Group to try to exceed, or even just to match this conference.

Full Disclosure – SAP are a GreenMonk client and SAP paid for me to attend and speak at the SAP for Utilities event.

You should follow me on Twitter here

Photo credit Tom Raftery

I attended the International SAP for Utilities event in Mannheim recently and was surprised when in his opening keynote, Klaus Heimann introduced two new SAP energy management products.

The first is a customer portal for Utility companies which helps utility companies roll out online self-service sites for their customers. This is being made available for utility companies both as a product, and as a service!

And the second is an Enterprise Energy Management application. This is a product to help large organisations better manage their energy – and as Klaus explains in the video above, by energy, SAP is referring to all forms of energy, not just electricity. And water too. SAP hopes to sell this to utility companies, so they can offer it as a service to their larger customers.

I was intrigued by the announcements so I asked Klaus if he’d go on camera to say a few words about them. See the resulting video above and the transcription below…

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone, welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are here at the SAP for Utilities event in Mannheim and with me I have Klaus Heimann. Klaus you brought up in your keynote two new announcements from SAP, two very interesting announcements, can you tell me a bit more about them?

Klaus Heimann: Yes, for sure. The first one was about customer online services. That’s easily explained. 750 million households are currently receiving bills from their utilities that are actually produced by our software. And many of these consumers now are in a deregulated market increasingly getting into the smart grid. And so the number of contacts they have to the utility is increasing and the utilities are getting very concerned about the cost of their call centers, they want to switch to internet. And our offering is here that we want to develop internet self services made-to-order for each utility as they want it, that refers back to the SAP for utilities instance that our customers are running.

Tom Raftery: So this means that the utility companies have an internet portal for their customers?

Klaus Heimann: Yes. The interesting thing is actually we can run that portal for them. And now that’s a longer story, but it’s really a not only an IT product, it’s also an IT service that SAP is thinking about to really help reducing the cost of our customers and make their consumer, customer service more attractive. The second announcement I made is about enterprise energy management. It’s not really a utilities application, it’s actually across industry application that helps big enterprises, number one to save energy, so save kilowatt hours, number two to better give —

Tom Raftery: You were explaining to me earlier this — when are saying energy, you mean, you actually mean energy, you are not talking just electricity.

Klaus Heimann: I mean energy in any kind, actually I also mean water. So primarily I mean energy like electricity and gas, it could also be oil, it could be petrol, it could be water. So we are looking to everything, but clearly the biggest savings are in the area of electricity and gas, that’s why we focus on it. And as I said it’s a cross-industry solution that helps our big enterprises to save energy and also to do a better procurement, a better planning for energy demand and we are presenting this here at this conference, because we do believe this could become a service that our utilities customers use themselves to help their big customers to improve their energy efficiency, because if the utilities don’t do it then somebody else does it, and I think it’s an attractive business especially for retail utilities.

Tom Raftery: Fantastic. Klaus that’s been great, thanks a million.

Klaus Heimann: Thank you.

Disclosure – SAP are a GreenMonk client. They paid for me to attend, produce videos from and speak at the International SAP for Utilities event.

The International SAP for Utilities event – focus on renewables and in-memory computing

SAP announces two new energy management products