SAP analytics to steer IPL auction

Enterprise applications software giant SAP has diversified its innovation base in the Indian enterprise space further by making the task of putting together a cricket team as easy as the westerly breeze upon Old Trafford.

The company’s SAP HANA, a sophisticated statistical analysis tool will assist the management of Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) at Wednesday’s player auction where 514 cricketers will go under the hammer with a total of Rs 274.50 crore available across eight teams. Uncapped Indian players will be making their debut in the auction.

SAP HANA is expected to make KKR’s task of winnowing through the massive player base easier through predictive analysis, said SAP Labs India MD & CEO Anirban Dey on Tuesday.

“There is no single way of picking a winning team. When you execute a team building strategy, the statistics and analytics engine will help you build the optimum combination after assessing player strengths and weaknesses. We essentially enable a better decision making process. Our team worked at record speed to prepare the auction platform for KKR,” Dey said.

SAP developed a real-time analytics platform to power the decision making capability of the Kolkata cricketing franchise during the auction, by mirroring an actual auctioning process. SAP Auction Analytics, which is capable of running on multiple devices, has been custom-developed for KKR. Coming with extensible features, the auction analytics software will carry out real-time data mining of player statistics to shell out insights which help KKR make reasonably accurate decisions while placing bids for players.

“These will be actionable insights to streamline the decision-making process during the auction. The platform provides significant insights based on various aspects of the players and a live dashboard of the performance of other teams during the bidding process. Comparisons can be made more efficiently between players and informed decisions taken. During pre-bidding, the question is always one of assembling a dream team. This platform makes it much easier. And, it will not fully replace human intervention in decision making,” Dey said.

Venky Mysore, CEO, Kolkata Knight Riders, said the new auction technology will help clarify various touchpoints in the decision-making process and narrow down options to specifics, thereby, simplifying the process. “Filtering and grouping skillsets of different players will help us once the bidding starts,” Mysore said.

SAP holds a 47.20 per cent share of the enterprise resource management market and 27 per cent of the business intelligence market in India, according to research firm IDC.