For me, the third week of December 2011 was a week of revelations of sorts in the realm of enterprise applications. Amid all the IT punditry/buzzword talk throughout the year about cloud computing, analytics, mobility, social, and in-memory, there were two concrete announcements in mid-December from two vendors that gave me pause. Both vendor product announcements are still far away from their commercial use in earnest, but their visionary nature is what had impressed the usually skeptical analyst in me (to the point of being accused of Drinking the Kool-Aid).

First, at SAP's Influencers Summit 2011 in Boston, I learned that the much-publicized SAP HANA offering is not merely an in-memory server blade appliance for quick analytics and data crunching. Rather, it is the underpinning of SAP's future architecture, both on-premise and in the cloud, and it is a general-purpose database in its own right. Look for an in-depth article on this topic, and you can read this 2011 review article by TEC's analysts in the meantime.

Another revelation took place during UNIT4's winter Boston tour in the very same week.

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