As a Partner and Principal Consultant at Amick Brown, Arun is responsible for business development, maintaining trusted relationships with customers and providing solutions and direction. Arun served as a Solution Architect at AT&T and then Accenture with a focus on SAP ERP, Data Analytics and Technology Architecture. Arun joined Amick Brown to lead its first ever project and has since then worked with our partner companies helping to win and execute work for Amick Brown. Arun, along with the other Amick Brown partners, has been successfully working on the expansion of Amick Brown’s business into the public sector and the Cloud domain. He is also responsible for establishing and overseeing Amick Brown’s subsidiary, Amick Brown India.

Arun has all-around experience in the IT industry across functional and technical domains throughout his 24-year career. He has experience in functional areas such as Finance, Supply Chain, Human Resources and Real Estate providing support in Architecture, Strategy, Vendor Selection and ERP and Analytics Solutions. He has performed various roles covering the entire software development lifecycle and numerous technologies from the development and management of complex technology landscapes to the nitty gritty troubleshooting of technical issues.

Arun has been an avid hiker since his college days and continues even now with many hiking and backpacking trips. In 2019 he has done several hikes in the California Sierras including the feat of climbing Mount Whitney in one day. He has a keen interest in history, economics and the financial markets. He also likes to spend time on sports, cooking, winemaking and music. He is a hobby guitarist and enjoys playing rock, blues and jam music.

Arun lives in San Ramon, California, with his wife of 18 years and two children who are also budding musicians.

Follow Amick Brown at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/amick-brown-llc

Connect to Arun through  Arun’s LinkedIn Profile.  We hope to hear from you.

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Our decision to pursue ISO 9001 accreditation supports our commitment to providing high-quality services to our clients and to our goals of continual improvement.  We have developed our quality management system in order to improve overall performance, to maintain a high-level of quality with regard to our services and to focus on customer satisfaction.

To become ISO 9001 compliant, Amick Brown developed key process plans and documentation, a quality manual, measurement, communication and purchasing plans, as well as processes to track non-conformances and corrective actions.  We would like to acknowledge The Core Solution.com – ISO Experts for Small Businesses (www.thecoresolution.com) for helping us to understand the standard, providing training to our team and guidance as we built processes to ensure our compliance.

Amick Brown underwent two comprehensive audits by Perry Johnson Registrars, Inc. (www.pjr.com) in order to achieve the certification.  We are proud to say that there were no non-conformances noted.

We look forward to providing high quality services to our clients and to continual improvement.

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For the 4th year in row, Amick Brown will be listed on the San Francisco Business Times’ Fast 100 list representing the top 100 fastest growing private companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.  We also will be listed on the San Francisco Business Times’ list of 50 Fastest Growing Private Companies in the East Bay. As part of this coveted award, we will be featured in a special publication on October 20^th, as well as celebrated at a private awards event on October 17^th at the Four Seasons San Francisco.

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How ready is your organization to take on a culture shift? I am not talking about a new CEO, or a new CIO, or CTO –

Can we talk about the cultural impact of real-time?  Can we discuss adding SAP HANA, Advanced BI tools like Lumira 2.0, or Simple Finance to your processes and abilities, and how this will affect your work culture? Beyond technology readiness, this is a decision factor that must be addressed for success.

Here are some concerns and realities:

1. Transitioning from IT driven reporting to self service: Deep dive, professional level reports will not go away, but there is a fear within IT that it will. Let’s face it, it has taken years of skill attainment, understanding data extraction, understanding business goals, and intricate graphic building that tell a story to the many.
2. Conversely, relief from report requests will cause proactivity: Another common conversation is with exasperated IT leaders who are bombarded with reporting requests that tie up their already formidable schedules. It will be a relief to give secure access and self-service so that the business can gather insights on their own.
3. Dollar ROI aside, HANA creates a chance to strategically shine: Our Managers, IT Leaaders, and Business Leaders were hired for a reason other than to chase R & A. What if we foster a culture of strategy, innovation, and positivity with these skillful folks? Someone who has the drive to think ahead of the next cycle will intuitively find monetized and non-monetized ways to make your company better.
4. Data is forcibly cleansed : The monkey on many companies’ backs before this transition will be resolved! A major technology shift , disparate systems, and cross departmental capability will cause a data clean-up extraordinaire . It is very, very common for this to be a primary bump in the road to a tech change. You are not alone!
5. The business units are brought to the tech decision table: Communication challenges lead to communication bliss once the sides understand one another. Having spoken candidly with many, on the tech side and the business side – You Both Want the Same Thing. Devising Change Management communication will change your life .
6. As well, the tech team is clearly valued in the success of resolving business problems:  Since both sides understand the motivations and skills of each other, symbiosis starts to occur.
7. Verifiable Accountability : With this new strength in data, speed, and R & A, owning a result is a constant. No more blame, no more delay. However, the positive is these same strengths, give you dramatic strength to run your business more collaboratively, strategically, and skillfully.

So, my friends, as you continue your advanced technology journey – remember that you are not alone. With the many hard and soft considerations, Amick Brown is here to navigate with you. Each situation is unique – and ready to move forward with the correct roadmap and perspective.

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Since we hear this often, I compiled a top shelf view of HANA choices and applications. I have a much deeper view available, so please reach out for Case Studies specific to your situation.

Enjoy!

Let’s look at value felt by customers. These are the primary categories that are affected and how you will see benefit.

Value By Business:

1. Operational Reports, Dashboards & Analytics: Turbo-charge your organization with a reporting solution that provides the in-depth information you need, at the speed you need it.
2. Data Warehouse and Data Mart: Enable your business users to pinpoint the right information at the right time, accelerate analyses, and see the trends that will help them shape smart business strategies.
3. Optimizing Business Operations: Respond quickly to changing business requirements and market trends, and develop a competitive advantage for your organization. SAP and partner solutions powered by SAP HANA can play a dramatic role in optimizing business operations.
4. Big Data: Gain new insights using the SAP HANA platform for Big Data. Acquire a variety of data sources, perform advanced analytics, and deliver new applications to drive performance and gain competitive advantage.
5. Real-Time Operational Intelligence: Deliver real-time insight to front-line workers by rapidly analyzing data from machines, streaming events, and business operations
6. Decision Support, Simulation and Automation: Streamline business flow and improve decision support by leveraging advanced analytics to transform insight into profitable actions

If you are confused about which HANA product makes sense, you are not alone. The game changing tech is daunting in its profound abilities, and we are here to start defining success with you.

Value By Product:

1. SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA: Drive your entire enterprise in real time with SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. You can plan, execute, predict, simulate, and analyze almost instantly along business critical end-to-end processes.
2. SAP Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANA: Get rapid access to data with SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA. You can lower costs, make better business decisions and drive innovation.
3. SAP HANA Platform: Utilize new, modern, in-memory platform to streamline, innovate, and transform your business with the SAP HANA Platform
4. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud: Secure a competitive advantage with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. The solution is built for mission-critical operations and offers elasticity, automation, and ease of administration.
5. SAP HANA Cloud Platform: Build, extend, and run next-generation applications in the cloud for today’s always-on, mobile, social , and data driven world with SAP HANA Cloud Platform

Again, this is the tip of the iceberg on defining your HANA environment and business case application. There is much more to follow so you can educate on how to deploy HANA well in your organization. Watch this space!

See Amick Brown’s HANA expertise

Site: “SAP HANA Use Cases v 2.0”

Sheri Tate, Director of Marketing

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For the second year in a row SAP has received the number one ranking in the Wisdom of Crowds 2016 Advanced and Predictive Analytics Market Study by Dresner Advisory Services. The Dresner study reached over 3000 organizations and vendors’ customer communities and 20+ industry verticals with an organization size ranging from 100 to 10,000+.

Study findings include:

• Organizations view advanced/predictive analytics as building on existing business intelligence efforts.
• Over 90% agree about the importance and value of advanced and predictive analytics.
• Statisticians/data scientists, business intelligence experts, and business analysts are the greatest adopters of advanced and predictive analytics.
• Regression models, clustering, textbook statistical functions, and geospatial analysis are the most important analytic user features/functions.
• Usability features addressing sophisticated advanced/predictive analytic users are almost uniformly important today and over time, led by easy iteration, advanced analytic support, and model iteration.
• In-memory analytics and in-database analytics are the most important scalability requirements to respondents, followed distantly by Hadoop and MPP architecture.

I find it interesting that the Dresner study finds “Hybrid roles are also evident” and confirms SAP’s customer organization usage of predictive analytics. The research study looked at core advanced and predictive features, data preparation, usability, scalability, and integration as key criteria to rank the vendors.  Though usability criteria looked at many things, I would like to highlight one key one—“Support for easy iteration”—that ranked as most important.

In the scalability criteria, “In-memory analytics” ranked as most important one followed by “In-database analytics” and “In-Hadoop analytics (on file system).”

Read the Complete Dresner Report

You can find lots more in the 92-page Dresner Wisdom of the Crowds report. I invite you to take a look.

AmickBrown.com

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Sr Director SAP Big Data Product Marketing, Technology & Innovation Platform

Big Data offers analysts and data scientists the opportunity to build more sophisticated and more accurate predictive models than before, but without the right data environment, it’s not easy. It requires an in-memory architecture that supports thousands of columns and billions of rows and a predictive analytics tool that can harness that architecture, such as SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics.

Twentieth-century technology is insufficient. Blame it on the disk. Back in the 1980s, database engineers saw a world where memory was extremely expensive. Just one terabyte of RAM cost over $100 million US dollars. Today, we can get it for less than $5,000 US dollars. So, vendors built database architectures centered on the disk.

In a Big Data world, the disk is simply too slow. Consider this: reading 1 petabyte of data off a disk sequentially – i.e. no seeking, just end-to-end straight off the disk – takes 58 days using the fastest hard disk available today (according to the Tom’s Hardware website). SSD definitely speeds things up: two days with the fastest SSD RAID. It’ll cost millions to buy, though.

In many ways, Big Data is a real-time data access problem. That’s precisely why innovators are developing new ways to store and process data, all in an effort to get around the hard disk bottleneck. All of the approaches, in essence, minimize the bottleneck in order to improve response time.

Distributed Computing

Distributed computing spreads a lot of data across many disks that can all be read simultaneously. Hadoop builds on the concept of distributed computing, but opens up the platform to handle any data set with any arbitrarily designed algorithm. To overcome the disk, the Hadoop community built Apache Spark, which provides a distributed data processing architecture, like Hadoop HDFS, that operates in-memory across commodity hardware.

Columnar Databases

Like distributed databases and Hadoop, columnar databases optimize data storage architecture in order to reduce the amount of data read off any one disk. It does this by grouping related attributes, or columns, together. The assumption is that most analytical queries only use a subset of columns, so you should only access data related to those specific columns. They also highly compress the data, further reducing the number of bits read off disk.

In-Memory Databases

In-memory databases take it to a whole new level by removing the disk from the equation altogether. It leverages the power of today’s processors to read and analyze data at a raw speed that’s 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than reading data off the disk. In some cases, customers have experienced performance gains of 100,000 times faster. How?

–   Compress the data with in-memory columnar data stores

–   Move the data accessed most often into L1 caches on the chip

That’s why we are so bullish about in-memory and the SAP HANA platform for Big Data. That’s not to say disk solutions don’t have a role to play. But…at the core you want an in-memory system that can run algorithms where your data is. No moving the data to the algorithms, that doesn’t work in a Big Data world. Instead, move the core algorithms into the data system.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics is the right tool for business analysts and data scientists to build predictive models from Big Data. First and foremost, it can analyze data inside SAP HANA and Apache Spark. There’s no need to transfer data out of these environments for processing. Rather, the SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics processing engine can run inside these tools –  dramatically improving performance.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics is also able to analyze exceptionally wide datasets. In fact, you can have up 15,000 columns in a dataset, while other tools support only a few hundred to 1,000 columns at most. This ensures that your predictive models provide the greatest level of accuracy possible.

Big Data is radically altering our world. It’s a game changer. For those who grab hold of it, you have an opportunity to propel your business forward – and the surest way forward is with SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics running on SAP HANA or Apache Spark. It is the best combination for building predictive models on Big Data, whether you’re a business analyst or data scientist.

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Every week at Amick Brown, we are questioned about HANA There is a lot of confusion in the market with the multiple options. As well, there are many questions about timing and business application. You have asked, so we will start a series of HANA articles to address your questions.

SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, shortened to SAP S/4HANA,  is a big strategic play from SAP. Here is why you need to take heed.

The new SAP S/4HANA is supposed to replace the SAP Business Suite (formerly R/3) over the next few years. This announcement and the launch of the software lay a roadmap for SAP in the coming years.

What led to this launch?

SAP is a leader in ERP worldwide. However, in the recent past, a new trend is taking over in the business world. Cloud-based software services also known as Software-as-a-Service. SAP has SaaS components to it, but its main business model has been selling software the old way: software installed at the customers’ premise.

Other cloud companies  have been slowly chipping away at SAP’s market share. And this is SAP’s answer.

Name

The R in R/3 stood for real-time. The S in the S/4 stands for Simple. This is the big idea. SAP is planning on simplifying the ERP system with this release.

Database

While SAP R/3 Business Suite ran on any database, S/4 runs exclusively on HANA. SAP has spent considerable financial resources and effort on building up the in-memory database over the past few years. SAP HANA has tremendous performance advantages compared to the older disk-based database solutions. This large-scale change has enabled SAP to dramatically simplify both the data-model as well as the user-experience.

One significant aspect of HANA is that it is an in-memory appliance. This means data-access times (disk read/writes) are not an issue anymore, allowing developers to focus more on business logic than performance. This lends itself to the other motivation for S/4 – simplicity.

The Cloud

SAP S/4HANA is mostly a movement of SAP’s premier software from customer premise to the cloud. However, on-premise solutions will still be available. SAP offers 3 options:

1. Public Cloud – Completely managed by SAP. Multi-tenancy shared by all public cloud customers
2. Private Cloud – Partially managed by SAP. Exclusive database per customer.
3. On-Premise – Software installed on client’s hardware. Client pays for user-licenses.

Software

SAP S/4HANA will allow customization to S/4HANA on the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). This means ABAP developers will get to continue to use their skills. If you don’t know OO, it is a good time to learn it.

UI

Let’s admit it, SAP R/3 has not been known for its stellar user-experience. UI on SAP R/3 has been clunky, rigid and unwelcoming. But the S/4HANA user-interface will be based on SAP’s Fiori UX platform. SAP Fiori, launched earlier in 2014, gives the software a new look-and-feel. The fact it does not have licensing cost should make it attractive to customers with an existing SAP installation.

Conclusion

Co-founder, Hasso Plattner said “If this doesn’t work, we’re dead. Flat-out dead.” This may be just Hasso Plattner being the passionate visionary that he is. But this indeed is a huge launch from SAP, one whose initial roll out is expected to be 3-5 years, and customer transitions lasting more 10 years.

The story on S/4 HANA continues here.  Watch this space and Follow Amick Brown on LinkedIn

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