Live from SAP TechEd 2012

Martijn de Jong, 14 November 2012

Being a “SAP TechEd 7-Time Attendee” I know what i can expect of a visit to the TechEd. As always I am eager to experience the new and “happening” SAP innovations and to talking to the developers and product guru’s. Because #SAPTechEd 2012 contains almost 2000 sessions I am focussing on cloud and mobile though. This is my recap/impression of the first day.

This year we travelled in a pack of code and scoop eager developer wolves, trying to cover the complete broad range of the SAP developer landscape. (and oh yeah, we also took a “Suit” along with us, to do his “thing” at Sapphirenow, though probably the most hungry wolvee…)

Of course the first day started with the usual keynote formalities by Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe.

Bill wasn’t present in Madrid because of urgent family matters, but was interviewed via an online video chat. His story was kinda adjusted from last year, but overall it covered Cloud, Mobile, Social networking and Real Time/Predictive (ergo Hana). From a developers point of view nothing new to the table here except for the pecial attention to design thinking, but I was “digging” his story on how succesfull companies are turning their strategy in a “Total customer experience” strategy. At Acorel we focus on CRM and mobile, so I could easily relate to it. His introduction of SAP 360 Customer Experience also contributed to the feeling that we at Acorel are betting on the right horse. Unfortunately, he did not got into more detail on it, then “Wow”, CRM on Hana, “Game Changer!” (a term he used a bit to often…) or something similar.

Now Jim was on the plate. He told us to think “Fascinating” each time we make mistakes, face issues or encounter the unexpected. This will open our mind and change our mindset and although he exaggerated it a bit, for the first time I bought his story. I think this can actually work, so thanks Jim, for that one!

His story further focussed on the Cloud, comparing the mature music industry coming from the “classic” way of selling LP’s in stores in the 1960’s to selling 20 billion mp3’s via iTunes and using Spotify nowadays.

A new strategy story line for me was the Business Innovation (see picture) with 4 dimensions: Customer, Supplier, Money and people. These dimensions are the most/only important things for companies.

Of course he had to focus on Hana to, but we better should not count the times he mentioned that “H”-word. His killer quote to make the comparison of Hana vs Disks was: “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones”, which I must confess, I have already used a couple of times to now.

The recap of both keynotes:

“We live in fascinating times. Go create innovations to make life better!”

Now of we go to the 2000 sessions and the showfloor. I built my agenda on the first day around some roadmap and strategy sessions. A recap of the Highlights?

SAP Business by Design development is easy to enhance

We still differentiate on 3 types of apps: SUP native apps, Hybrid Web Apps and OData apps.

– SUP 2.2 will be introduced this week, containing functionality for B2C apps, use of http channel for faster integration and and solution manager integration.

– SUP in the coming year will be further integrated with Syclo Agentry and Sybase Mobiliser and will be rebranded, not redesigned/discontinued, integrating the best of all worlds in one platform

! – NetWeaver mobile will not be further developed and it will disappear in the SAP Mobile sales architecture. !

– For Afaria, Configuration capability and Content Management is here

– For Cloud I guess I missed out on the new interesting stuff, maybe because it isn’t new as Acorel is 1 out of 2 only Sales on demand partners in the Netherlands…. (bit of a sales pitch there…. 😉 )

Some other interesting stuff to see:

Impressive showcase from McClaren, showing how they optimize their racing performance using 120 sensors on the car communicating via various systems to Hana in real time to optimize the cars performance.

Something with 3D and Hana on smart energy control in cities.

An interesting wall with the history behind SAP.

We ended the day with my favorite part, the demo jam.

After the usual celebration of the SCN mentors and Top contributors, the demo’ started.

Personally I really liked most demo’s and think that the level was higher than last year, but I was really impressed of what the InnoJam teams delivered after only 30 hours of coding. (although I understood that these teams did have truck loads of dedicated Microsoft and BlackBerry specialists to assist them). Nevertheless an impressing performance! I was also excited to see what Logica came up with, because their introduction text, looked a bit familiair to our VNSG DemoJam text, but their combination of Siri, or I believe Google Voice, and Hana, wasn’t really inspiring. By the way, this is our solution on Siri and CRM: Handsfree CRM or in the SAP App catalog in the evolved solution Acorel Voice Note.

Forunately our friends at Ciber had less trouble with their connections than on the VNSG DemoJam and they performed my personal runner up demo, with their Carbage Collector Business Proces.

But none of the competitors stood a change against Las Vegas TechEd winners KeyTree, which came up with a new demo for Madrid containing 3D CEO Vision. The complete audience was stunned and although I don’t see the business value, the DemoJam is a developers party and using 3D goggles, 2 microsoft kinects and interfacing with Hana certainly makes my day!

The winners!

That concluded an interesting first day of the Teched 2012, but hopefully today is going to bring a bit more scoops, because I am a bit disappointed of the news worthiness of the first day. Nevertheless I was inspired and triggered and am looking forward to dive a bit deeper in the tools and techniques today!