Data boom poses challenges

An international software exhibition in Dalian, Liaoning province. Global software providers are poised to invest in China because of its huge number of small and medium-sized enterprises creating massive demand. [Photo / China Daily]

Competition drives demand for more instant information

The global data management software market may embrace more innovation in coming years as the difficulty of data processing continues to increase, said executives from SAP China.

"The rules of play are changing because our customers need to process more unstructured data promptly," said Horace Chow, vice-president of SAP China, a leading business software manufacturer.

Only a few years ago, businesses had limited demand for real-time data. Now companies in various industries are keen on such information as fierce competition forces them to obtain more instant data to better service their customers.

"The next-generation data processing software should be able to handle an increasing amount of real-time statistics. It will make the organization of fragmented data easier to reference," said Chow.

Increasingly stringent customer requirements have thrown a number of challenges to software providers: The integration of data warehouses and cloud computing, the use of mobile data services and, most importantly, how to analyze enormous banks of data in the blink of an eye.

SAP's solution was to adopt in-memory computing and storage technology to speed up data processing.

Access to data stored in memory is more than 1 million times faster than that to data stored on a disk. At the same time, the cost of memory storage has decreased from about $106 million for every terabyte, or TB, in 1990 to less than $5,000 this year, making the technology ready for practical application.

"The in-memory storage method helped us to improve speed so that results from a query can be returned in 45 seconds versus waiting up to 20 minutes for incomplete results from the same data analysis software running on a traditional disk-based database platform," said Shanghai Volkswagen, a carmaker that has adopted an in-memory data processing system.

Moreover, global software providers are poised to invest in China because of its huge number of small and medium-sized enterprises creating massive demand.

"China's thriving social media industry and e-commerce business have created a huge market for data warehousing companies," said Aaron Hsin, China president of Teradata Corp, a data warehouse provider with headquarters in the United States.

Another reason that international data companies are eyeing China is because the number of the country's SMEs remains large despite a slowing gross domestic product forecast, according to Hsin.

"China's SMEs have played an irreplaceable role in raising fiscal revenues, generating more jobs and improving the structure of the economy," said Minister of Industry and Information Technology Miao Yu.

Miao pledged to promote innovation among SMEs, strengthen their ability to fend off risks and boost the development of small and micro-sized companies, Xinhua News Agency reported on June 23.

In late 2011, SAP pledged to invest at least $2 billion in China by 2015 to keep an edge in the country and boost innovation.

The company said it will establish five to six new regional headquarters and recruit 2,000 new employees in the country to better serve local clients.

"With this increased level of commitment, we are better positioned to help China enterprises run better. It will also spur broader innovation across the IT industry here for customers and partners throughout the ecosystem," said Hera Siu, senior vice-president of SAP and president of SAP China.

SAP is the fastest-growing among top vendors in the relational database management systems market, Forbes reported on June 18, citing a report from Internet Data Center.

The company has gained the highest revenue growth rate in the market, beating rivals such as Oracle and Salesforce.com, the magazine said. "With revenues of about $1 billion, it is now ranked fourth in the relational database management system market from a market-share perspective."

gaoyuan@chinadaily.com.cn