On March 18th, I attended the SAP Solutions Tour 2010 in my hometown of Philadelphia. The high impact agenda for the day was well matched by the energy of the audience of nearly 300 people.
The Opening Keynote: The Accelerated Pace of Change
Greg McStravick, SVP and GM of North America East Region, welcomed the attendees and spoke about SAP's commitment to customer success and our focus on enabling growth.
Mark Yolton, SVP, SAP Community Network, delivered a personalized keynote presentation on the Accelerating Pace of Change - calling out SAP's focus on solutions for organizations of all sizes and the value of SAP's extended ecosystem of partners and customer communities. View the presentation and the Real-Real Time Computing video, featuring in-memory.
Below is a quick keynote summary. I was fortunate to get an interview, so if you prefer, you can watch the video version, Five Minutes with Mark Yolton.
SAP's Secret Sauce - Enabling Best-Run Businesses
Being a Best-Run Business involves the key ingredients:
- Efficiency in application and infrastructure
- Flexibility through extensions
- Agility with the largest ecosystem in technology marketplace
From a more detailed view of an architecture perspective, four layers of SAP product strategy enable different speeds of technology adoption and ease of consumption. This framework for the blueprint is to:
- Scale Your Core Business - increase value and lower TCO of core SAP solutions through best practices, enhancement without upgrades, and enabling service-oriented architecture (SOA).
- Innovate through extension - Extend Capabilities for Line of Businesses, On-Demand Deployment, and leverage Non-SAP/Partner Solutions
- Extend Your Reach - leveraging the SAP Ecosytem
- Orchestrate - business processes and master data across the set of applications, on-premise or on-demand, to ensure it is consistent.
The Solutions Zone. Showcasing SAP Solutions and Partner Demos - each with experts on hand to answer questions. I had time to check out the few below:
- SAP Solutions for Sustainability - View the sustainability map
- Efficient Manufacturing Operations - See the demo on how to reduce costs and comply with quality standards
- Solution Extensions - Explore the Solution Extensions demos including SAP Document Access by OpenText and SAP Talent Visualization by Nakisa
- SAP Business ByDesign - Watch the overview video
- SAP CRM for Sales - Check out these demos on CRM integration with Facebook and Twitter.
The Afternoon Keynote
Ed Satchell, VP of Value Engineering, wrapped up the day with the afternoon keynote on Value Management. For more on the topic see http://www.sap.com/services/education/catalog/value-management/index.epx The curriculum is designed for individuals who will support the adoption of value disciplines in their organization. These individuals are typically from IT or business organizations, and have responsibilities for business/IT strategy alignment, business case development, performance management, process/solution strategy, and organizational change management.
Overall...choose a winning strategy to manage change.
How to Survive - Stay Connected, Stay Informed
- 1. Your Account Executive
- 2. Online
- 3. Events
SAPPHIRE: Orlando (May 16-19), Frankfurt (May 17-19), and virtual
SAP TechEd: Berlin (Oct. 12-14), Las Vegas (Oct. 18-22) Bangalore (Dec. 1-3), Shanghai (Dec 1-2)
View my photos from the event on Flickr.
The Philadelphia location was the last North America SAP Solutions Tour 2010 location - but additional SAP TechTour events will be held around the globe. If you would like to receive updates in real-time, please sign-up for the TechTour Alert.
A special mention to the Philadelphia event sponsors who helped make the day possible: AchieveIT Solutions, Aster Group, CNE, Dell PerotSystems, Neoris, StreamServe, AACS, Capgemini, Column5, Freudenberg IT, and OSIsoft.
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