SAP at work on Sentinel, an 'Amazon for Stocks'

SAP is at work on a new product called Sentinel that is supposed to be "nothing less than the Amazon for Stocks and the Facebook for Investors," according to a job posting associated with the project. "We take our metaphors seriously," adds the job listing, which was first flagged Thursday in a blog post by SAP consultant Richard Hirsch. That said, the Amazon comparison seems more apt than the Facebook one, based on other passages in the ad. "Sentinel blends Algorithmic Trading with deep News Analytics into a disruptive synergy, powered by SAP's revolutionary in-memory HANA platform and deep text analytics capabilities," it states. "Our sole purpose is simply this: to help millions of investors identify profitable trading opportunities with minimal cognitive overload. The end-goal is to build a system that is simple but not trivial; deeply quantitative but not confounding; advanced but not abstruse."