I've been to Innojam and.., won! No not that way - I wasn't on the demojam stage.

[Former Member]

So the question you all want the answer to - You think you won?  Are you crazy?  No we didn't win from the judges.  You probably already know that.  But what you don't know is that I won!  But wait didn't you say your team didn't win?  Yes, that's what I just wrote.

Here's why I won:

• Sleepless night + food
• Presentations
• Technology
• Networking

More reasons why I won:

• Ivan Mirisola
• Jeff Hathaway
• Jon Wilson
• Eric Ledu
• Vivek Sarif
• Carlos Pereira

These people were AMAZING!  Jeff had just come up on SAP.  Eric and I had only "talked" via comments to blogs.  Jon - I met him prior to the event.  He's a very dynamic guy.  Actually the entire group was, there was not a typical technical person in us.  Carlos and Vivek are not to be forgotten.  They were part of our solution as well.  What was amazing to me is that seven people who had never even talked with each other got together in a group and produced a "product".  I had never met Ivan.   Wow - what a diverse group!

So what did we do?

• Jon - the idea guy, he played with Gateway, and I watched him
• Me - River gal, some of our team with help!
• Carlos - HANA amazing, hacker who can clone an environment to use. 
• Jeff - He understood the flow of things.  He was our functional BPX guy.
• Eric - He created the configuration for DMS practically by the time we were done speaking about it.  He also created a report BIondemand in the cloud.
• Vivek - helped in all areas - gamification
• Ivan - The River guy!  The go to person for help!  And we both worked on design.

Diversity at it's best - I'm looking this up on SCN - I may get some of these wrong:

Jon Wilson - Australia a consultant

Me - US a Customer (1998)

Carlos Pereira - A hacker, No I mean - Protugal - a consultant

Jeff Hathaway - The new guy - No really, true, his company just came up on SAP.  He is a functional type person.  - US Customer

Eric Ledu - he wrote a great blog on a non-politically correct feedback on SAP Tech'Ed - From France - an independent Consultant

Vivek Sarif - I couldn't find him on SCN - bummer - so I searched the web - he is a ghost.  I couldn't find him.  Hopefully he reads this and I can update

Ivan Mirisola - SAP Brasil Ltda - Sao Paulo

And how did it all come back together?

Well here is where we hit some snags.  We didn't get all of our pieces talking to each other.  River talked with SAP via Gateway (Why?  Because it was cool and we could do it.)  River talked with BIonDemand - this was done well, but we couldn't show it live!!!  For some reason the screen wasn't updating quickly enough.  River to the gamification software.  This worked well, but we really didn't do much with it.  So there wasn't a lot to share.  Then Hana - we did Hana because we could.  But it is impossible to show that we processed millions of records in seconds.  Hana was not attached to our other solution.  However they had loaded around a million records.  Carlos got to play with Hana.  Again I took a quick look over his shoulder.

We did think about adding Sybase.  Why?  Just because we could.  And we would get to play with it.

Now - are we all super individuals that knew the technology?

No - absolutely not.  Maybe Carlos knew something about Hana.  Eric did know DMS configuration, but I believe that was it.  And here's where my next big win comes.

Expert Presentations (Not to be Missed)

Before we got started there were several presentations.  River

• SAP bydesign
• Gateway
• Sybase Unwired Platform
• Hana
• Gamification Platforms

BIG WIN - we got to work with the Experts - the people who presented and who came with them.  Another secret?  We asked questions of different teams.  They had experts among them.

So my next big win:

• Working side by side with the experts
• Asking the questions totally unrelated to Innojam to the expert
• Seeing all the great demos

Sleepless Night and food

Well I did get food.  The sleepless night - well, I found out on Tuesday that was a bad idea.  A very bad idea.  See my blog about Speaking at Las Vegas Teched - Failure.  Anyway, I now know I have to have sleep to function well.  Just learning that was part of my win.

AND.... About the Technology

Oh goody!  All these fun new technologies to choose from.  Why choose just one?  If you've been keeping up - well we didn't - choose just one.  Ahhhh... We choose five of them!  Mmmmmm...  Maybe we should have scaled back a bit.  BUT for me and my team mates, we loved it.  It was very cool to touch the different technology.  I learned about BI byDesign, Gateway and River!  I looked over Marcos's shoulder on Hana.  And did learn some about Gamification when I attached River to it.

So did I win?

YES!  I loved it.  I would do it again in a heart beat.

And for those who wonder - what on Earth did they present.  Our idea was all about ideas.  How they start small go through an approval and grow.  At different levels people can invest in the idea.  At each level there is a return on the idea.  A lot like the stock market.  Our Avatar would grow as the idea grew, and back to baby status if the idea was not used.  (Gamification)  We never got to the point where the Avatar grew and shrunk.  The points could then be used for different things.  Company cloths, vacation days or whatever your company decided.

There was going to be a specific time limit on the time ideas could come in.   At some point all the points are refreshed.  And that is what we presented.  Sort of.  Kind of.  At least the parts we had done.   We were doing reports against it.  The ideas were going into SAP in the DMS.  And the actual points were handled by our gamification software.  Our big reports were run in Hana.  And we would have loved to get a handheld working that showed the idea - and where it was at.  Your points, etc.

See we did have a BIG IDEA.  We just didn't have enough time.