SAP HANA consultant John Appleby, UK-based Bluefin Solutions set up shop in Philadelphia

Tom Paine

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John Appleby has crossed the Big Pond and settled outside Philadelphia.

Appleby is with Bluefin Solutions (not to be confused with the Bluefin just reported by the Business Insider to have been acquired by Twitter), a large UK-based SAP consulting firm with close to 200 employees, as its Global Head of SAP HANA. He is also among a distinguished group known as SAP Mentors, of which there are approximately 100, representing those considered by their peers to be the top experts in the field.

John Appleby

A native of London who has spent considerable time over here in the past, Appleby is now making a permanent move to establish a beachhead for Bluefin in the US, particularly for its growing HANA practice. HANA, which has been considered variously as an acronym for HAsso's New Architecture (a reference to SAP founder Hasso Plattner) or High Performance ANalytic Appliance, though neither is a formal name, is SAP's in-Memory processing platform which is said to accelerate the speed at which some tasks can be completed by 100 to 1,000 times. It achieves this by largeley replacing the tme-consuming swapping of data from in and out of disk drives to the use of large amounts of random access memory to keep more data within the core CPU during processing. While other vendors use in-Memory to varying degrees, probably no other has an architecture that deploys in-Memory on such a scale, and SAP has made it clear it will become the foundation for its entire range of product offerings. SAP said that revenue from HANA, which first shipped in late 2010, reached $532.5 million in 2012.

For now, Bluefin is focusing primarily on converting customer data warehouses using SAP NetWeaver BW to HANA, Appleby told me in a phone interview. SAP announced at the beginning of this year that its flagship Business Suite ERP (enterprise resource planning) software is now able to run on top of HANA, although it will still be in beta until some time later in the year. Appleby says there might be some significant developments concerning ERP on HANA at SAP's SAPPHIRE NOW conference in May. While ERP, with its emphasis on transaction processing, doesn't gain as much speed from HANA as data retrieval and analytical functions, a key benefit it gains is in breaking down the wall between analytics and and transaction processing that typifies most database architectures. Another hope for SAP is to displace arch-rival Oracle as the provider of the underlying database on top of which SAP ERP often runs.

Appleby says Bluefin has a small base in the US now with "a few people working on projects", but he hopes that will increase significantly over the year and produce a few million dollars in billings. As Bluefin adds people in the US, some will be located in the Philly area but others will be based elsewhere. He said he chose Philly (rather than say Palo Alto) because Newtown Square is home base for SAP's "go-to-market" sales and customer service teams, because of the proximinity of potential customers, and because he finds it generally to be a more well-grounded and balanced place than Silicon Valley. Also, its difficult to keep in touch with colleagues back in Europe from the west coast hours.

Ask what he likes about Philadelphia, he mentions its tremendous culinary tradition ("a well kept secret") and likes the fact that one can travel to a lot of places quickly from there. What he doesn't like is the history of corruption in the city (though he quickly adds that he has met Mayor Nutter and thinks there are signs of progress under his leadership) and its infrastructure problems.



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