SAP Understands football better than er...football
NFL prediction wasn't quite so accurate
http://www.itbusiness.ca/news/denver-broncos-to-defeat-seattle-seahawks-in-super-bowl-big-data-analysis/46604
When England played in Ecuador and Honduras for “warm weather training” in June ahead of the World Cup, they’d already lost the tournament – they just didn’t know it. SAP Match Insights Do the bendy data, SAP Wayne Rooney and Co took to the field in Florida to adjust to the hot and humid climate they’d face in Brazil and …
I see a few weak spots in this story:
- If the product does not need SAP support, then it isn't SAP. Unless version upgrades are counting as support, this will go nowhere inside a business that is living off the yearly maintenance support fees. So likely this product is going to be spun off in a separate business.
- The much touted HANA scalability could not play a significant role here unless the Germans built a small data center inside their training facilities. Which they did not, we would be hearing about that from a proud HW provider otherwise. So HANA was used, but not for what it is supposed to be used.
No need for a data centre, just a buttload of storage and RAM.
In fact, I've seen HANA run on a single PC (just as a geeky "because it's there" thing to do). It was an incredibly terrible idea, but it just about worked. There's also little need for scalability in that use case, because it was likely 1 location and very few users, not the 24/7 worldwide hammering that current HANAs take.
They probably wouldn't have planned any upgrades in the time just before and during the competition: being German, the DFB's techs would have tested the absolute living crap out of it before putting any hardware on a plane.
That was my point, if there wasn't a need to scale then using HANA is just a show off. Also, the way I understand HANA's architecture, its scalability is very much about data size, not very much about number of users (if you're able to resolve queries in a very short time you can resolve them for lots of users)
Support or support?
I think they mean without SAP technicians holding the coach's hand and telling him which buttons to press - i.e. user friendly, I know, not usually a concept that SAP understands, but hey, there is always hope that it will filter down into other products.
I don't think all of them are that bad, just enough to make ti difficult for the others.
It probably doesn't help that players don't see playing for England something to aspire to. There also doesn't seem to be any coordinated plan to bring kids through to the top levels. Perhaps there is and I haven't noticed!
I wonder whether they'd have been better off just playing basic football with people in their usual positions and not worrying about what the opposition would do and not worrying about saving players for later.... especially as it turned out there was no later.
While watching a couple of games with a few beers and good company, I noticed the brightly coloured, almost day-glo, boots most of the players were wearing. I wondered if tapes of the games could be analysed to predict, or at least simulate, movement of players on the pitch. In video games, the player would control one team member (the one with the ball), while the game's AI would move the other players to tactically important places on the pitch.
Sounds like the SAP software could be used to improve the AI of games like FIFA. Given that Sony were one of the World Cup's major sponsors, a Sony/SAP tie-up seems possible.
Colin
Beer Icon because several were involved in formulating this idea :-)