Impressions from the SAPphire 2010
The Start
Normally I need half a day to make my head free of all this daily stuff, to change the level of view. This SAPphire, by the way my first SAPphire, was no exception. I needed some time to clean my brain from Loops, Selects and Business-requests. A big help where my new Mentor-fellows, some of them I knew since years, some of the I knew via their Forum-posts and Blogs.
My thought was that as a technical oriented Consultant the Teched would fit better to me. But at the end such an event is not only about hard facts. It is about contacts, networking and impressions. Nevertheless the technical part of mine is not disappointed.
The first impression of the SAPphire 2010 in Frankfurt was that I wonder about how huge this event is. This SAPphire is the first SAPphire that runs in parallel with the SAPphire in Orlando. All together both SAPphires are followed by 50.000 people direct or via internet. How impressive!
The Maintopics
There are three topics in the middle of this SAPphire: Mobile devices, InMemory computing and sustainability. Of course the acquisition of Sybase is disused everywhere. Actually this acquisition fits exactly to the both first main topics.
What does innovation need?
Sometimes you start to think about something because of a little trigger. As a Mentor we got a Flip camera to select Statements that can be published on YouTube. By the way I did a terrible job with this camera. I will screen my videos at home and see if there is suitable material.
Nevertheless this flip-camera fascinates me. It is easy to use and it is fun to play around with it. Actually in my Mobile phone is a video-camera, too. But I never use it. It is much more fun to use the flip-camera than to use the mobile phone. But what is the reason for that?
Actually I never use the photo-camera of my mobile phone, too. The reason for this is, that it is no fun. The performance is so bad that everybody runs away until you have shot the first photo. Spontanious photos are not possible.
For me as a rational person it is hard to understand: It is not only about what is possible. It is about fun. We don't want to use Equipment and Software only because of its function, we use it because it makes us curious and we have fun to use it. We want to start with the new function as soon as possible, not after reading the whole manual.
That must be the reason why Apples IPhone and IPad are so successful.
Jim Hageman Snabe said: Innovation starts with Quality. That is true, but Innovation starts also with curiosity, passion and fun! And probably curiosity, passion and fun on both sides, on one side of the developer of the innovative product, on the other side the user of the innovative product.
Beside the Maintopics
But back to SAPphire. One point that satisfy me is, that well known concepts like standardization are not old fashioned. In more than one session was told that standardization was one of the key figures of a successful project.
A very good idea came from Wolfgang Gaertner (CIO Deutsch Bank). He said that they don't describe the request anymore, but only the gap between the standard process and the request. Sometimes ideas beside the main topics are very valuable. For me this statement was something to think about.
InMemory
I was asking me one question and not only me. In a session about InMemory computing I asked if it would not be a good idea to change the complete database layer. If you have a database layer with a n InMemory database, the ERP system must be very fasr. Nobody answered this question and now I know why. This is exactly what Hasso Plattner described in his Keynote. A fantastic presentation with the description of an ImMemory Database the will be available back to all 4.6 Systems. For me this is the biggest and best innovation shown on this SAPphire. I talked with some customers about the ImMemory Database, all of them are fascinated about this idea.
Even as a Techie I am more than satisfied with these three days, full of refreshed and new contacts, new impressions and new ideas. It will probably need more than half a day to come back to my daily work.
