WSJ has an article on SAP's radical new SW. The data access is all in memory. OOh.

In-memory computing could be crucial for cloud computing, because offering services online requires companies to rapidly process large volumes of data. In December, SAP said it would pay $3.4 billion to acquire San Mateo, Calif.-based SuccessFactors Inc., which offers online services that help manage employees and carry out performance reviews. The company also paid $5.8 billion in 2010 to acquire Sybase Inc., which makes software that can send business information securely to mobile workers on their devices, easing a potential concern with HANA.

I wonder if the Google and Facebook developers look at this and say this is innovative?

SAP convinced Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, a large university hospital, to drop its Oracle software and switch to HANA. Together SAP and Charité developed a prototype of an iPad software application that uses the HANA machine to analyze three million data points for 140,000 admitted patients annually and determine if they are a fit for a clinical trial. Using the application, the hospital said it reduced the time it takes to find patients from weeks to less than one second.

"We need all this data in real time," says Martin Peuker, deputy chief information officer for the hospital.

Sounds like a problem has solved over and over. Now that would be scary to SAP if Google instead of Oracle said we can find the patients in your data.

Or Facebook could say this is a social networking problem, we can find the people you should connect with.