SAP Hosts First Big Data Forum for Australian Startups

SAP Australia has held the first ever SAP Startup Forum in Sydney where eight startup companies were invited to attend a full day of collaboration, learning and competition around big data trends and technologies.

The global SAP Startup Forum offers startup companies a unique opportunity to create easy-to-access solutions to help solve real-world problems using SAP HANA.

Dereck Daymond, GM Database and Technology Group at SAP said: “We saw some great innovations during this first Startup Forum. Eight entrepreneurs pitched their business case and software solutions with six selected to participate in the Development Accelerator (DA) program.”

The companies were selected based on a number of criteria: the innovation of the idea; feasibility of the business case; proximity to SAP’s portfolio; fit with SAP HANA: technical feasibility; and whether the solution could be market ready within one year and have a prototype in time for SAPPHIRE NOW Madrid in November 2012.

The six startups chosen are:

SenSen Networks: a video and business analytics (VBA) solutions company. It can convert video images into accurate business analytics data to deliver increased productivity, revenue and novel insights for decision makers in a wide range of businesses. SenSen VBA solutions detect, extract and analyse relevant events from video streams and render them as valuable information to businesses.

SummaBI: a cloud business intelligence tool, developed specifically for hospitality and retail sales businesses/franchises.

Resonate: a provider of customer feedback (Net Promoter Score) programs and data visualisation solutions for large brands in the Asia Pacific region. Resonate identifies the key customer drivers, turns unhappy customers to brand advocates and offers a closed loop feedback program.

GoCatch: a smartphone application that connects taxi drivers directly with passengers. The taxi-location app uses GPS to allow passengers to book and track taxis close to their location using their smartphones. Thousands of real taxis from Australian cities can now be seen driving in real-time through the 3D world of Google Earth.

baank: a website and mobile app that helps consumers manage their money, achieve saving goals and get the best deals.

EngineRoom: a specialist in enabling the world to leverage, discover and create value from their data. It brings big data processing on demand.

The Development Accelerator will kick off with a 2-day Bootcamp in October where the entrepreneurs can learn more about SAP HANA and discuss and validate their business case with HANA experts. The primary objective is to get SAP HANA proof points by testing / porting startup apps to the platform.  SAP provides the participants with a free version of HANA to build and test with.

The SAP Startup Focus program is working closely with SAP Ventures, the independent venture fund of SAP AG, to identify and cultivate ground-breaking startups who can deliver high quality solutions to real-world problems using HANA. In April 2012 SAP Ventures announced the $155M SAP HANA Real-Time Fund. While the Startup Focus program does not fund startups and participation in the program does not guarantee venture funding, the program will facilitate recommendations of promising startups to SAP Ventures.