Vishal Sikka's keynote as usual threw some numbers showcasing HANA's power. Three announcements: BI On Demand on HANA, Project ChariTRa (connecting those with needs and those who can provde the needs), HANA in the Cloud (which he later conferred happened due to SAP Mentor's collective voice). Interestingly he seemed to enjoy running demos more than speaking at times and yes he did speak few times in Hindi on request from @vijayasankarv and seconded by @dahowlett. Next was partner keynote by Dr. Anup Ghosh from IBM India talking about Smarter Planet Initiative followed by Hettie Tabor from Accenture US talking mostly about BI Analytics with HANA.
Later on SAP had a Preso with two customers - Dr. CN Ram (Group CIO Essar) who spoke about CO-PA Accelerator with BW on HANA shrunk reporting time from 15 hours to 48 seconds challenging Business to think what can be done to utilise this technological capability. Three phrases that struck "time to go beyond transaction", "analytics taking centre stage" and "need for getting best governance but the horse power was missing". The other customer Manish Choksi (CIO Asian Paints) shared their partnership experience with SAP right from NW and xApps in CRM space in 2004 to being the first adopter of Gateway very recently. He stressed on viability to make disruptive technology like HANA embraced by enterprises at least in India. The power of technology is showing up in SME sector with By Design solution from SAP that makes running business "viable".
Later half of the day went in with other Mentors in an animated discussion with Sethu M and later on Vishal Sikka. Next was an interview by Anne Hardy at TechEd Live studio on showfloor sharing our InnoJam experience with Ahbishek, Kaushik and Saravana. The replay is here. Later in the evening Kaushik with his team achieved something fantastic as blogged later.
Networking is a significant part of TechEd and this time too I met folks from my old company Nishant Dave, Sarath Krishnan, Kalyana Kothamasu, Murali V, Narayan Gond, Ramesh Mahankali, Tushar Natu couple of first timers F2F like Sreenivas Krishnamoorthy, Ajay Maheshwari and of course fellow Mentors couple of them for first time while others once again. Did not manage to go to any lecture session except sitting in the session by Mentors Abesh and Dipankar who presented a framework in MII. looking forward to two HANA hands-on sessions that I have managed to sign-up in the morning on Thursday and Friday.
Personally DemoJam was a letdown as more than half of the team presentations seemed extension of SAP keynote demos. In fact one team went on quoting Vishal Sikka's morning keynote presentation 4 times in their 6 minutes alloted time. This year clearly iPad won "DemoJam Device of Choice" award beating 2 usage of laptops and lone Samsung Galaxy Tab usage. The first on stage was the InnoJam winners who developed their solution over the weekend and refining over couple of days versus other teams who had 10 weeks to prepared. The last team comprised of university students from down under who had a refreshing demo with physical props. Interestingly enough most of the crowd were in DemoJam first time in their life which I suppose made life for Ian Kimble easy stepping in Craig Cmehil's shoes for first time. Demo Jam was very appropriately won by GlobeMaster (team of Univesity students) with the InnoJam winners coming just behind them. Kudos to both teams - to me both won the competition hands down over the other teams who incidentally were all from SAP.
For a change Anil Kumble spinned a web of words at Guest Keynote. Later in night dropped in Jim Spath to his hotel from where he walked all the way to Convention Center in the morning before doing same for few others. Finally my i20 was stress tested for about a km giving lift to 6 adults (no I am not competing). That was Day 1 of TechEd Bangalore 2011.
InnoJam Bangalore - from participant perspective | View Webi reports & Xcelsius dashboard in Java web portal | Day 1 | TechEd Bangalore Day 2 | TechEd Bangalore Day 3
