Yesterday, I attended SAP Forum in Denver – an excellent event and I highly suggest you check to see if one is coming soon to your area – they are doing quite a road show. You can find the locations here: http://scn.sap.com/community/events/sap-forum
I also self-taught myself how to tweet with hashtags and all yesterday! An avid facebook and linked in user, I had not spent much time working with twitter. I was so excited when #SAPNorthAmerica retweeted my tweet. Very cool.
I attended the key note sessions and the Innovation track. Thumbs up to all the presenters!
Here are my ‘cliff notes’ of the keynotes:
The Future of Business – Paul Young, VP SAP, Paul Young, VP, Customer Strategy for Global Database and Technology
A dynamic and easy to listen to speaker, Paul’s message to the audience was “You think of it, SAP will build it’. He shared some pretty amazing feats on how SAP is changing the world one development at a time. Examples like using a checkout as you go gadget at a grocery store (driven with a HANA database) that knows your buying history to suggest other products you may like also based on your location within the store which increased purchases by 15% per shopper at a European grocer. Another example was using HANA database to quickly perform root cause analysis on a cancer diagnosis based on a gene sequencer in a matter of minutes when it would have taken hours, or even days per patient on older technology – making the information more accessible and affordable to the greater population. Some pretty cool stuff – or as my friend Wade Walla would say ‘face melting’.
Analytics – Eric Fearday General Manager, North America Analytics
The theme of Eric’s presentation was ‘The time to rethink the way we are doing things is NOW’. He spoke of intelligent cars, the new information customer, the massive growth of mobile devices and how all analytics need to be real time and accessible. My 11 year old car obsessed son would have loved his presentation of how Maclaren is using analytics to simulate auto races. He also reminded us how analytics need to tell a story. Ponder that for a bit.
Business Success in Today’s Market – Rich Vanguard, publisher of Forbes
Rich shared with us the hard and soft virtues needed to be successful in today’s market. Some are a bit trivial, but we all need to be reminded sometimes.
Hard Virtues:
- Cost – use the reverse of Moore’s theory – continue to reduce cost by X every Y years.
- Speed – deliver ON TIME
- Supply Chain Management excellence
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Soft Virtues:
- Design and Integration
- Teams and Teamwork – knowing that Great Leaders have Great Followers
- Brand
- Purpose – without purpose, you have nothing
INNOVATION Track
SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA for Real-Time Business – Helen Sunderland, SAP
Key takeaways –
HANA – stands for High Performance Analytic Appliance
or Hasso’s Awesome New Appliance (I think I may have remembered that incorrectly – but you get the idea).
Think of it as a modern data warehouse. The database is stored in-memory instead of on a slow moving (well, relatively) disk.
HANA Accelerators provide Agility –
HANA Analytics provide Insight
HANA Applications provide Innovation
The Business Suite being run on HANA is face melting (thanks again to Wade Walla for that term). The announcement came out in January of this year and I really did not quite get it. But I do now. They have optimized 24 business scenarios and 400 reports with the first release and more planned. Hasso Plattner has given the ‘order’ to rewrite all programs in SAP that take > 3 seconds to execute. Amazing. Think about the average company that runs MRP – they wait 6 – 8 hours for it to complete. It will be done in seconds. Think how agile your business can be with that information supplied so quickly!
This was the biggest takeaway for me – BABY STEPs with SAP HANA. I am by no means an expert after a one hour chat with Helen during Happy Hour, but check in with your SAP Account team – ask for a Value Engineer – and find out how your company, no matter your size, can take Baby Steps to implementing a HANA database. It is licensed in GB and you can run ‘pieces’ of SAP on it. I always thought it was an all or nothing solution and only for the big guys, but that is a misnomer.
