back to article SAP: It was our Big Data software wot won it for Germany

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 …

  1. Wedgie

    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

    1. AMBxx Silver badge
      Alert

      Re: SAP Understands football better than er...football

      Sadly, that page isn't loading at the moment. Any more details?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Also, it had to be sufficiently simple for the German team’s staff to use without SAP support"

    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.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Also, it had to be sufficiently simple for the German team’s staff to use without SAP support"

      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.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "Also, it had to be sufficiently simple for the German team’s staff to use without SAP support"

        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)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Also, it had to be sufficiently simple for the German team’s staff to use without SAP support"

      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.

    3. Stretch

      Re: "Also, it had to be sufficiently simple for the German team’s staff to use without SAP support"

      HaHaHaHANA? Its must have been damn slow then. And crashed a lot. Very slow and unstable under load, and my instance is deployed by SAP, run by SAP, in SAP network. So it ain't me.

  3. Anonymous Coward 101

    "Average ball possession became a critical factor with the need to look at receiving the ball, control, passing and pass completion."

    This will come as a shock to Woy Hodgson, whose tactics of losing the ball, incompetence, and passing the ball to the opposition were key to victory.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      To be fair, Gerrard's back header to Suarez was an amazing example of receiving the ball, control, passing and pass completion. Or would have been, if they were both playing for Liverpool, rather than England and Uruguay.

  4. Richard Taylor 2
    Unhappy

    England had already lost. Some talented individuals with no sense of teamwork, inflated egos and salaries to match. They were pathetic. The German team played the opposite way (except they also had talent).

    1. Matt 21

      To be fair

      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.

  5. Evil Auditor Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Vorsprung durch Grossdatentechnik, is rather what they'd like to say in Germany.

  6. Colin Brett
    Pint

    Motion capture?

    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 :-)

  7. earplugs

    Software didn't change a thing

    Germany still held on to the ball too long in their half, and didn't do anything with it. Duh!

    1. Matt 21

      Re: Software didn't change a thing

      Apart from score seven goals against Brazil and win the competition..... useless idiots!

  8. jonha
    Headmaster

    "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik"

    Folks, if you really think you must dabble in German compounds, please ask your resident German (you do have one, don't you?) before putting such risible nonsense into a sub header.

    1. gazthejourno (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik"

      Was? Sagst du, dass unser Deutsch unleserlich ist? Quatsch!

      (It's one of our things to deliberately mangle foreign tongues. We are British, after all)

      1. Evil Auditor Silver badge

        Re: "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik"

        Nein, leserlich ist es schon, nur etwas zerfrickelt.

        Gut für uns grammar Nazis! (Guys, what's grammar nazi in German?)

      2. aBloke FromEarth
        Coat

        Re: "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik"

        You probably mean unlesbar.

        Unleserlich is more like unintelligible (e.g. handwriting)

        *fetches coat

      3. big_D Silver badge

        Re: "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik"

        Da es kein Deutsch war!

        Großdatentechnik ist ein Nomen und muss mit einer Großbuchstabe anfangen.

        Data gibt es in Deutsch nicht, es heißt Daten.

        Sonst ist alles in Ordnung. :-P

      4. big_D Silver badge

        Re: "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik"

        Ah, is that you that I see in the cafe in Osnabruck every day making a pig's ear of German? :-P

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik"

      Genuine question, but what is such "risible nonsense" about what was said?

      My school boy German (and Googles from the look of it) reads that as "leading through big data technology", a nod to the Audi tag line.

      1. big_D Silver badge

        Re: "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik" @AC

        "grossdatatechnik" is not German, that is the problem.

        The "g" must be capital, because it is a noun. Data is not German, it should be Daten, so the word they were looking for was "Großdatentechnik".

        1. Evil Auditor Silver badge
          Happy

          Re: "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik" @AC

          Wow! Können wir starten einen Deutschen thread in El Reg starten?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik" @AC

            Crossed the wrong one out there. Können is your first verb, so starten goes to the end.

            1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
              Headmaster

              Re: "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik" @AC

              Sofort mit diesem Geplauder aufhören! LAUT AUFSCHREI!

              Lucky the germans had only mastered Hollerith cards back then. The Blitzkrieg would have transformed into a Gammastrahlenausbruchkrieg. Dodged a bullet.

              german asuka triumphant.jpg

            2. Evil Auditor Silver badge
              Happy

              Re: "Vorsprung durch grossendatatechnik" @AC

              I beg to differ. This being El Reg's comments I crossed out the "right" word.

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