Both Praendl, SAP’s GM of Analytics, and Banks, VP of Analytics and Big Data, were keen on the adoption of predictive analytics and the automation of roles – as you would expect from a company which has just announced a raft of new predictive capabilities.

Diving down into why these tools are needed, Praendl, said: "We are taking predictive out of this small group of 10 mathematicians, that are working in a corner and bringing results from the models to the end user when it was already too late."

This pinpoints one of the key issues that has historically faced predictive, for a long time it has been the tool of the data scientist that no one else can use. So, like it is doing with other technologies, SAP is bringing it to the masses by simplifying it.

He is confident about the solution that they offer, bolstered by the acquisition of KXEN, he feels that there are many use cases open to enterprises to put it to work, without the fear of breaching privacy.

"I think we have a much better situation than the Google’s and Facebook’s, because we are handling business processes in enterprises and there are so many use cases for predictive where we do not breach privacy.

"We have predictive maintenance projects for production lines, predictive to check parts to alert us before they break down."

Part of SAP’s confidence around not breaching privacy is that it is a European company, Praendl: "We know how to deal with privacy and how it is in the EU, I think for US based companies it’s a bit…different how they deal with that."

While predictive analytics popularity is growing, some fears remain about its use, the problem is changing the mindset to trust an automated system to make the right decisions, knowing that if it goes wrong it can hurt your business.

Banks explained the results of it going wrong: "Lots of money lost spent on software and even worse, the business outcome could be dramatic. You could get a prediction that tells you to do something that could have incredibly bad consequences for your business."

Banks went on to say: "There a lot of vendors out there, a lot of the older predictive technologies quite frankly I think are too hard to use."

This is where SAP really feels it is able to make a difference, by bringing predictive in as integral to all analytics.

Banks: "We want predictive to look much more like normal BI and to become the future of BI – in five years we’ll remember how ridiculous it was that it wasn’t a part of it."

SAP has developed the tools to make sure that the data that is being used is good, with Smart Data Access and Smart Data Quality along with agile data preparation which pull together threads of data to look for correlations, the good records and the bad ones.

One area where Banks feels these tools can play an important role is in IT, freeing them up to be doing higher level tasks.

Banks, said: "IT needs to be advising like how do I connect to Facebook, should I connect to Facebook, can we trust this data, whats the governance model I need to put in place if I build this data lake, so I don’t start exposing customer credit card numbers, that’s what IT needs to be doing."

For this to take place though, a re-organising of what IT does and does not need to deal with has to take place.

Banks: "I think there needs to be better structure. Part of what we’re doing is to make the tools easier for IT to use or easier for the end user to use so they don’t need to involve IT at all.

"We need to train IT with what they need to engage with and what they don’t because it needs to evolve, it has to evolve. IT still does a lot of things for the end user organisation that quite frankly the end user organisation should be able to do for themselves."