WALLDORF — SAP SE today announced the winners of the prestigious Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award, an inaugural honor that recognizes employees whose inspirational and extraordinary achievement best delivers on the company’s vision and strategy. In a close finish, the teams from “SAP HANA Spatial” and “Zero Downtime Maintenance” were chosen as winners from six finalists and more than 250 nominations. The two winning teams overcame significant technological and organizational challenges to deliver solutions that simplify business problems and focus on the customer while delivering meaningful value. They also demonstrate and reflect SAP’s success in nurturing a startup culture that was first exemplified by its founders 42 years ago.
The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is designed to showcase the spirit of innovation, entrepreneurialism and courage of SAP’s founders and its goal is to inspire these qualities in everyone at SAP. The annual honor, awarded for the first time this year, awards cash and equity valued at EUR100.000 to each winning team.
“The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the most prestigious distinction ever awarded at SAP,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. “It inspires everyone at SAP to strive for the amazing spirit of innovation, the courage to take entrepreneurial risks and the determination to make the world run better that set SAP’s founders apart.”
Award Winners Solve Big Problems, Deliver Real Value to the Customer
“SAP HANA Spatial” intends to allow processing of spatial data directly within the SAP HANA platform. The team, six developers from the SAP HANA development group, harks back to SAP’s five founders, technology innovators who dared to think big and take risks to develop a simpler and more scalable solution for a burning business problem. Spatial data describes the position, shape and orientation of objects in space and represents a key technology for taming and monetizing Big Data, mobility and the Internet of Things. The technology is based on a set of completely new algorithms that fully exploit the enormous performance of SAP HANA.
“By integrating spatial capabilities into the SAP HANA engine, the system complexity of customer landscapes becomes much simpler,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board, SAP SE. “This new integrated approach allows scenarios to be done directly on SAP HANA without an additional component.”
Real-time processing of spatial data opens up completely new scenarios and business opportunities in industries such as insurance, energy, utilities, transportation and retail.
“Zero Downtime Maintenance” intends to deliver a groundbreaking concept for the future of software maintenance. Currently, when a company wants to import new software or maintain its systems, it has no option but to factor in a certain amount of downtime. The “Zero Downtime” option simplifies an often complex challenge for the users of on-premise solutions, but the project team is already turning its attention to SAP cloud operations as well. The new approach envisions to completely eliminate downtime.
“The Zero Downtime team has built the foundation for the future of SAP. This puts us in a league above other cloud companies and reinforces our leadership in the cloud market,” said Gerhard Oswald, member of the Executive Board, SAP SE, and head of the Scale, Quality & Support Board area.
The winners finished ahead of four other finalists, including:
- SAP Match Insights solution built on SAP HANA in the cloud: The planned solution is browser-based, uses the latest user interface (UI) technology and runs on SAP HANA and other databases. It enables coaches, scouts and players to analyze huge amounts of data in real time and with the corresponding video sequences. The German National Football team used SAP Match Insights en route to its 2014 World Cup win.
- Boston Marathon Crisis Management with SAP HANA: After the Boston Marathon bomb attacks, an app based on SAP HANA was developed to pull together data from the city’s systems, including the real estate office, and from publicly accessible sources to establish which businesses were affected and who the owners were.
- Analytical Reports Amazon-Easy: Internal users of analytic reports set out to simplify their work. Users do not want standard reports imposed upon them; instead they want easy access to information they can filter and display on any device. Based upon extensive end-user feedback, the team envisioned and built a simple, one-stop analytic and dashboard solution based on SAP HANA that everyone, including the customer, wants.
- Autism at Work: Autism at Work is a new, worldwide program at SAP where the company aims to have one percent of its global workforce come from the autism spectrum. The program was born not out of philanthropy but because individuals with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have special skills that will help SAP to stay innovative, which is at the very center of the company’s intellectual renewal.
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Media Contacts:
Dana Roesiger, +49 (6227) 7-63900, dana.roesiger@sap.com, CET
Scott Behles, +1 (917) 494-2009, scott.behles@sap.com, PDT