Investigating a Digital Disruption: SAP HANA

Running head: INVESTIGATING A DIGITAL DISRUPTION
Investigating a Digital Disruption: SAP HANA
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1INVESTIGATING A DIGITAL DISRUPTION
Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................2
1. Business background.......................................................................................................2
2. Digital Disruption Analysis: Impact of SAP HANA.......................................................4
3. Potential Challenges and opportunities of SAP HANA..................................................6
3.1. Migration to SAP HANA: Challenges.....................................................................6
3.2. Opportunities of SAP HANA...................................................................................7
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................8
References............................................................................................................................9

2INVESTIGATING A DIGITAL DISRUPTION
Introduction
Digital disruption can be termed as a change that generally occurs when a business
integrates new technology in their daily business operations. The integration of technology in
daily business is sure to transform the operation of business model within a company. The new
technologies implemented have a profound effect on the value of the existing products and the
services offered by the company. This is then reason why the term disruption is used, as the
integration of technology with the existing operations of the company disrupts the current market
and causes the need re-evaluation (Mujawar and Kulkarni 2015). Digital disruption marks the
changes in the consumer need and allows the business to fulfill the emerging needs of the
business. The literature review focuses on SAP HANA used by Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart focuses on
speed and innovation with Sap’s HANA technology. The vast corporate infrastructure of the
world’s largest retailer Wal-Mart is streamlined with the help of SAP application. The review
focuses on the business background, analysis of digital disruption in Wal-Mart along with the
challenges and opportunities that is offered by the emerging technologies in future (Cohan 2017).
1. Business background
Wal-Mart is an American multinational retail corporation operating as a chain of
departmental stores. Through innovation, Wal-Mart has been creating thousands of stores in US
that have expanded internationally. Wal-Mart has begun building its supercenters in the year
1988. It offers one stop shopping experiences for the customer by combining a grocery store with
freshly produced bakery and daily products. Most of the supermarkets in Wal-Mart are open for
24 hours, which includes specialty shops such as salons, banks, restaurants and so on. Thus, Wal-
Mart manages a large chain of operations across the world and therefore a proper system was

3INVESTIGATING A DIGITAL DISRUPTION
essential for integrating all the operations. Use of SAP HANA helps in managing this large chain
of operations in Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart operates world’s most dynamic ecommerce organization,
which is one of the competitive advantages of the organization. It possesses some of the best data
scientist and a large amount of commerce data in the world for delivering a personalized
shopping experience. The huge data gathered helps in understanding the need of the customers.
Every week, Wal-Mart gets traffic of 245 million customers in 11,000 stores and e
commerce website. This results in capturing an immense amount of data everyday about its
business. With the advent of data mining, these collected data could be put to a variety of uses
and had a lot of potential to unlock an innovation throughout the company, which is data driven.
However, the present data warehouse of Wal-Mart had certain limitations such as lack of speed,
flexibility and timeliness. Hence, the company embarked on designing a modern data warehouse
that provides real time data, unlimited granularity and support to the thousands of concurrent
users. Speed of data processing, which was a major concern with the old warehouse, is
eliminated by the new data center. This was achieved by implementing SAP HANA. This
platform handles 200 billion rows of data and has the capability to insert updates at an hourly
rate in to the system at a rate of up to three million rows per minute. SAP HANA became the
leading choice in powering the Wal-Mart’s data café, as the deployment was mainly driven by
the need for speed. The employees of Wal-Mart can respond to the challenges in real time, with
the implementation of SAP HANA.
SAP HANA is designed for replicating and ingesting structured data from different types
of SAP databases and other applications (RameshJadhav 2014). The replicated data is generally
stored into the RAM rather than loading it onto the disk. It is basically an in memory database
and application platform that is capable of performing many operations much faster than it would