I recently read that SAP’s HANA (High Performance Analytic Appliance) has been used by a transportation firm to sort through 360 million traffic records in a little over one second. For those new to the HANA world, here is a brief introduction SAP HANA and the SAP Business Suite.
This is truly impressive, considering that not all that long ago, I managed a SAP BW project where it was taking approximately 8 hours to process 2 billion records! Such processing speeds open up a vast new range of possible applications, no doubt, but I wonder just how many businesses’ actually have such data volumes’? Some that come to mind would be bioinformatics applications that require large volume’s of data to be processed precisely.
I would like to propose some of my potential ‘use cases’ as the IT guys like to say. Specifically, I would like to see some applications that specifically address consumers, such as, buyer bots! Imagine being able to query the current stock-pile of repossessed homes out there and finding out which ones offer the best deal in terms of price-per-square foot, financing, or even, which ones offer the best combination of average commute distances to work versus best performing school district. Such an application could work both ways, buyers could sort through a vast amount of information and sellers could perhaps find buyers quicker if they could provide the information to feed the above query when they put their home on the market in the first place.
I believe that HANA now provides a potential ‘eye-in-the-sky’ capability to the Real Estate market that never existed before. Today’s Real Estate market, if analyzed from the standpoint of degree of information fragmentation, is one of the most fragmented markets imaginable with some of the most severe, negative implications to the economy imaginable. You have 50 states, each of which has separate real-estate agent licensing rules and laws. You have mortgage laws that vary by state, land surveys that turn out to be wrong with errors sometimes having originated centuries ago.
The banks are making mortgages (and last I checked, they have more than 600 types of mortgage products available today versus 2 or 3 in the 70s) where they somehow have decided the borrower will have the same job for 30 years (not likely, Did You Know ). These mortgages, repackaged into CDS and then circulated throughout the world financial system, have brought the world economy to its knees!
Attached to this pipeline of homes-mortgages-global financial crisis, you have the New Household Formation rate, which basically means, every new house directly stimulates a massive amount of manufacturing activity because you have to furnish them.
Whew! That’s a lot of information to get your mind around, and unfortunately, no system currently in existence actually tracks all of it. However, HANA, coupled with the myriad databases and non-structured data sources involved in the processes mentioned above plus the many others I did not mention, just might provide some eye-in-the-sky visibility into the real estate market. Want to try HANA? Try Experience HANA.
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More reading:
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