An exhaustive analysis of the ASUG SAPPHIRE NOW Conference Agenda Builder has yielded an itinerary of 40 sessions related to cloud computing in the ASUG program. Like any IT industry forum these days, I found some cloud washing. I chose to ignore half ASUG sessions tagged with “cloud” because they did not appear to address cloud computing in any significant way. My list is guaranteed to be washed of cloud washing. If you are not satisfied, you can have your agenda browsing time back (legal note: Greg is in marketing and is, in fact, incapable of altering the space-time continuum, despite his claims. All implied guarantees and warranties are strictly rhetorical).
Four groups of cloud sessions
I dissected the ASUG cloud program into the following four groups. Some sessions address cloud computing as part of a broader context. These are denoted with ‘*’ in the session number. The rest directly relate to cloud computing topics. The four groups include:
- IT cloud strategy and operations (4 sessions): suitable for SAP program leads and enterprise architects
- Migrating on premise systems to the cloud (6 sessions): the technology and techniques for deploying or migrating on premise software to public or private clouds
- Software as a Service (24 sessions - including relevant LOB special interest group meetings): applications for line of business processes available over the Internet from SAP or other providers
- Platform as a Service (6 sessions): information about supporting custom development, security, and integration in the cloud
Greg's recommended ASUG Cloud Sessions
Below is my curated list of cloud-related sessions in the ASUG program. You can look up these sessions on the Agenda Builder by searching for session ID. A comparable agenda on the SAPPHIRE NOW side is the “Cloud for IT” custom agenda on the Agenda Builder. And, if you are looking for the best session related to developing a master IT strategy for cloud computing, arrive a day early to participate in the ASUG Preconference Cloud Strategy seminar. I guarantee that…(legal note: we just shut him off at this point.)
IT Cloud Strategy and Operations |
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Session ID | Title | Day | Time | Description | Type |
7 | How to Build a Cloud Strategy for Your SAP Center of Excellence | Sun., | 08:00 a.m. - 05:00 p.m. | Enterprise IT is facing unprecedented demands from business users seeking to take full advantage of trends such as cloud computing, proliferation of mobile devices, the consumerization of software, and expanse of social media. Of all of these trends, cloud computing is the unifying capability by which IT organizations at SAP customers can deliver new business innovations at a significantly faster pace. This workshop helps prepare SAP practice leads to develop a business-focused cloud computing strategy encompassing premise SAP investments and new software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. Presenters will examine business opportunities and use cases for solutions across the SAP portfolio, from cloud applications to development platforms and virtualization and cloud management technologies, including: SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management software, project “Titanium”, project “River”, SAP Business ByDesign, Success Factors, and application services for departments such as SAP Sales OnDemand, SAP Travel OnDemand, and SAP Sourcing OnDemand. IT industry analysts will share their research on how IT organizations are changing governance models as a result of cloud computing to align and cooperate more effectively with business users. A panel of SAP customers will discuss their experience migrating to the cloud. SAP experts will be available to discuss technical aspects of engaging in,... **For full description, visit: http://sapandasug.com/asugindepth.html | Pre-Conference Seminar Topic |
2402* | SAP s Enterprise Reference Architecture | Mon., | 12:30 p.m. - 01:30 p.m. | In this session you will learn how apply capability-based planning to SAP‘s enterprise technology reference architecture in order to develop a clear roadmap and design guidelines for your business. | Education Session |
4107* | Linking IT Strategy to Business Strategy: Strategic IT Spending | Tue., | 01:45 p.m. - 02:45 p.m. | Linking IT Performance to Business Performance: Strategic IT Spending | Benchmarking Session |
CL34* | The Voice of SAP Security | Wed., | 01:15 p.m. - 02:15 p.m. | Security and Internal Controls SIGs | Education Session |
Migrating On premise systems to the cloud |
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Session ID | Title | Day | Time | Description | Type |
701 | Virtualization and Cloud in the SAP Datacenter – Architectures and Use Cases of Real Customer Implementations | Mon., | 10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. | More than 80% of SAP customers use virtualization today. Additionally it can be seen that they also do carful steps into private cloud infrastructure implementations. SAP customers are looking towards virtualization and cloud technologies to help increase business agility and reduce costs in the datacenter. But is this technology really implemented and operated in an optimal way for the SAP datacenter? This session gives architectural guidelines, assessment criteria, sample solutions and an overview on technology options. The session also highlights use cases, how to efficiently operate SAP systems on virtualization and cloud infrastructures. Additionally the customer ExxonMobil talks about his experience and lessons learned in this area. | Education Session |
3702* | Building a Repeatable Process for Applying SAP Support Packs - How Crayola Implemented SAP Patch Management | Mon., | 12:30 p.m. - 01:30 p.m. | As a new company using SAP it is imperative to maintain your investment in the SAP software. This presentation covers the approach Crayola implemented to build a process to apply support packs that is repeatable, maintains integrity in the system, and has minimal impact to the business process. The presentation reviews business engagement, SAP infrastructure, testing processes, and Center of Excellence requirements. | Education Session |
2307 | How a World-Class Dairy Producer Virtualized Their SAP Landscape, Including HA, DR, and ACC | Tue., | 01:45 p.m. - 02:45 p.m. | Fonterra, a $16 billion (NZD) dairy company, virtualized their SAP landscape in 2010. Now they are on a path to not only deploy automated disaster recovery, but to be one of the first global-sized companies to use landscape virtualization management (LVM) in conjunction with the VMware vSphere platform. In this session, you will hear about Fonterra's SAP landscape, the decision to virtualize, and the deployment and best practices integrating LVM into your virtual landscape. | Education Session |
2309 | SAP Application Virtualization at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) | Tue., | 04:15 p.m. - 05:15 p.m. | This session will provide information on how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) successfully migrated their SAP application servers to a cloud computing infrastructure. Details will be provided which define the prerequisites of virtualized servers, the build processes which optimize an on-demand strategy, and the steps required to transform a traditional SAP infrastructure into a cloud environment. You will also learn about operational aspects of running production SAP applications in a cloud computing environment, including implementation of a cloud-ready disaster recovery model for the virtualized environment. | Education Session |
2412 | Migrating a Large SAP Landscape to the Amazon Public Cloud |
| 01:45 p.m. - 02:45 p.m. | A real-life case study of migrating existing SAP instances from a traditional datacenter infrastructure to an Amazon web services on-demand public cloud environment. This presentation will cover the business case, cost savings, how to plan, the major challenges and how they were navigated, the adapting of the traditional SAP landscape to a cloud-based one, and key leanings around the heterogeneous migrations and ongoing system refreshes. The presentation will also cover the changes needed to your traditional hardware and consulting partnerships when introducing a third-party cloud provider. Finally it will cover the adaption of traditional enterprise monitoring and orchestration needed to be successful, along with the audit and legal aspect of the new environments. | Education Session |
Software as a Service |
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Session ID | Title | Day | Time | Description | Type |
CL06* | Small & Medium Enterprise SIG Community Lounge Meeting | Mon., | 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. | SME SIG | Education Session |
1302 | A new way to improve communications with suppliers to streamline B2B transactions and business processes | Mon., | 12:30 p.m. - 01:30 p.m. | Businesses are more reliant on their network of suppliers than ever before. Due to increasing complexity of networks and accelerated speed of business, SAP wants to highlight how customers and their suppliers can address the challenges of increased costs, operational discontinuity, and constrained growth. Enabled for SAP ERP and SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM), SAP Information Interchange OnDemand and SAP E-Invoicing for Compliance OnDemand allow for a new way to connect suppliers and other business partners. Compare these solutions to traditional enterprise data interchange tools to understand how pre-integrated B2B content utilizes enterprise services and IDOC to lower the efforts of B2B enablement. Understand how SAP's recent acquisition of Crossgate and the SAP business-network-as-a-service solutions provide flexibility for managing your B2B infrastructure as part of enterprise integration scenarios. Look at procurement scenarios, where B2B integration is enabled for all suppliers regardless of their use of backend systems. Improve communications with business partners to streamline B2B transactions and business processes. | Education Session |
1803 | Reinventing SAP HR: Co-Innovation Beetween SAP and Customers | Mon., | 01:45 p.m. - 02:45 p.m. | In this session, participants will learn about the new approach SAP took to refine and develop one of the line-of-business (LOB) on-demand applications, SAP Career OnDemand. In addition to SAP, Air Products will share their view on how they perceived the collaboration. From early idea and concepts discussions, all the way through product design reviews and usability test sessions: get first hand information on how it is possible to influence the direction of a new product development early on, to provide feedback to SAP, and to get your hands on it while it is still in the works. This is collaboration between SAP and ASUG at its best - be part of the 12 month story of this project. | Education Session |
CL11* | ASUG SAP BusinessObjects Strategic SIG (Education): Update & Current Activities | Mon., | 02:15 p.m. - 03:15 p.m. | SAP BOBJ -Education | Education Session |
204 | Reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Using a Hosted (SaaS) Solution for Credit Cards | Mon., | 03:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. | This session will elaborate experiences from recent transition from on-premise to a hosted on-demand (SaaS) credit card solution. An on-premise solution was previously being used to manage, accept and secure credit cards in SAP. Discover how migration to hosted (SaaS) solution greatly reduced the effort in upkeep of constantly evolving specs in payment card industry. Understand what your exposure is when it comes to protecting sensitive customer data from breaches, loss of data, and loss of reputation. We'll describe how we reduced the scope and financial burden of Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance for this initiative, which spanned across the United States and Canada, involving multiple currencies, clearinghouses and very high volume transactions. Finally, we'll provide some simple practical tips to reduce your cost per transaction. We'll demonstrate how transmission of simple additional info back to customers can reduce not only the associated credit card transaction fees for you, but also facilitates customer invoice reconciliation. Which improves your customer satisfaction while reducing the burden on your collections department. | Education Session |
2405 | Managing Subsidiaries Managing Subsidiaries with an On-Demand Suitean On-Demand Suite | Tue., | 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. | Sven Denecken, Vice President for Co-Innovation in the OnDemand unit, has been publishing a series of blogs on the broader topic of twotier ERP. In this presentation, Sven will focus the discussion on the unique attributes of SAP Business ByDesign that make it particularly well adapted to managing an enterprise ecosystem in conjunction with the SAP Business Suite. Sven will cite numerous sources from the analyst community, business press, and customers regarding the pros and cons of centralization and decentralization. Finally, he will explain how SAP is able to orchestrate processes across Business ByDesign and the SAP Business Suite to provide customers with the best of both worlds. | Education Session |
CL15* | ASUG SAP BusinessObjects Strategic SIG for Support & Maintenance Community Lounge Session | Tue., | 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. | SAP BusinessObjects Strategic SIG for Support & Maintenance | Education Session |
CL16* | SAP Business Explorer (BEx) – Quo Vadis? | Tue., | 12:15 p.m. - 01:15 p.m. | ASUG Analysis/BEx SIG | Education Session |
CL17* | ASUG HCM Special Interest Group Facilitated Networking Opportunity | Tue., | 12:15 p.m. - 01:15 p.m. | HCM SIG | Education Session |
1908 | What‘s New in Travel Management with SAP: Choosing the Best Option - On Premise, On Device, and On Demand | Tue., | 03:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. | SAP has 25 years of experience in the travel industry, and continues to evolve the travel management solutions, which streamline the entire trip lifecycle from planning to reimbursement. Find out what is new with the on-premise SAP Travel Management application in the latest enhancement pack. See how the on-premise capabilities can be extended to a mobile device for travel expense processing with an enterprise app. Hear about the new SAP Travel OnDemand solution, and how it was built from the ground up to meet the needs to the business traveler. Learn how to decide which solution is right for you. | Education Session |
CL25* | Ask An SAP Mentor, Ingo Hilgefort, Your SAP BI/BusinessObjects/BW SAP Integration Questions | Tue., | 04:00 p.m. - 05:00 p.m. | Business Intelligence Community | Education Session |
CL29* | ASUG Global Trade Services (GTS) SIG Community Lounge | Wed., | 10:45 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. | SCM - GTS SIG | Education Session |
CL30* | Next Generation Professional Services Automation (PSA) | Wed., | 10:45 a.m. - 11:45 p.m. | Professional Services Providers (PSP) | Education Session |
CL33* | ASUG Web Intelligence/BW Roundtable | Wed., | 12:00 p.m. - 01:00 p.m. | BI and Web Intelligence SIG | Education Session |
1911 | Real-Time Travel Expenses through Mobility and Travel OnDemand | Wed., | 12:30 p.m. - 01:30 p.m. | SAP Travel OnDemand, a newly released cloud solution, is designed for business travelers and the way they travel today. In this session, find out how business travelers can easily get approvals, book a trip, upload their receipts and create expense reports for accurate and timely reimbursements that are in compliance with your corporate travel policy. See a demo of SAP Travel OnDemand in action in conjunction with mobile devices, including a camera-enabled smartphone and a table device to capture receipts and create expense reports on the road, freeing up business travelers from administrative tasks to focus on their business goals. Hear about the integration to SAP ERP Financials for faster expense reimbursement. | Education Session |
CL36* | SAP Supply Chain Response Management New Release Update | Wed., | 01:15 p.m. - 02:15 p.m. | SCM - Supply Chain Planning SIG | Education Session |
CL37* | State of SAP BusinessObjects Integration | Wed., | 02:30 p.m. - 03:30 p.m. | SAP BusinessObjects Strategic SIG (SAP Integration) | Education Session |
CL39 | SAP Business ByDesign for Subsidiaries of Large Enterprise | Wed., | 02:30 p.m. - 03:30 p.m. | SAP Business ByDesign | Education Session |
513 | Deliver Your Social Collaborative Strategy in the Cloud: In-Memory, Mobile, Business Applications and Analytics | Wed., | 03:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. | The best decisions require the involvement of the right people and the right information at the right time. Learn how you can extend your business intelligence (BI), customer relationship management (CRM), and other SAP application deployments with the social and collaborative capabilities of SAP® StreamWork™ and real-time data access with SAP HANA™ in the cloud to empower business people to quickly work together, share and analyze information, and drive informed decisions. | Education Session |
2113 | Driving Employee Engagement and Performance Through Collaborative Leadership | Wed., | 03:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. | Changing workforce demographics require a new style of leadership. Learn how you can use SAP® StreamWork™ to drive employee engagement and performance in your organization. Participants of this session will receive a customizable training kit that they can use to share knowledge with the rest of their organization. A free SAP StreamWork Basic edition account is provided. | Education Session |
3013* | Paper-Based Planning and Procurement to Paperless Planning and Procurement | Wed., | 03:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. | Vera Bradley is growing in retail presence, the number of products sold, the diversity of our supply base- and our need for flexibility and adaptability in our supply chain. We have outgrown our current Excel-based planning and procurement system and moving into utilizing Material Requirements Planning (MRP) in SAP to help plan purchases and production. See how SAP can enable better visibility, a unified business plan, increased customer service, lower inventory levels and the elimination of non-value added tasks. Putting SAP to work for us empowers our team members to spend time on proactive decision-making rather than tactical processing and time-consuming reactive reports. It also makes a full use of your investment in SAP while allowing your team members to create value by eliminating non-value added tasks. Additionally, this paves the way for future implementations of Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO) by introducing process discipline and better master data. | Education Session |
4012 | Influence Council for Travel OnDemand | Wed., | 03:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. | In this sessions we would like actively work with attendees to do a co-innovation session to provide feedback on planned developments in the new Travel OnDemand solution and to get feedback on the people centric approach. The session will include a very short demo on what Travel OnDemand is and than it will be kind of workshop character where Traveler shall explain their pain points and SAP will provide feedback on how we try to solve these pain points in regards to the travel process. | Influence Council Working Meeting |
CL40* | Roadmaps and Product Direction - BusinessObjects Strategic SIG | Wed., | 03:45 p.m. - 04:45 p.m. | BOBJ Strategic SIG | Education Session |
CL42 | Improve Business Performance with SAP Sales and Operations Planning | Wed., | 03:45 p.m. - 04:45 p.m. | SCM SIG - Supply Chain Planning | Education Session |
813** | B2B Roadmap in the Context of SAP PI | Wed., | 03:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. | In this session the strategy and roadmap of business to business integration (B2B) in the context of SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (PI) will be presented and discussed in detail. The session will cover all aspects and enhancements that are planned in the area of B2B integration with SAP NetWeaver Process Integration. This includes the on-premise B2B offering provided with SAP NetWeaver PI, B2B-based rapid-deployment solutions (RDS), managed services on-demand, as well as hybrid deployment options with a combination of on-premise and on-demand B2B solutions. | Education Session |
Platform as a Service |
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Session ID | Title | Day | Time | Description | Type |
| Cloud Platform for SAP Edge On-Demand | Mon., | 12:30 p.m. - 01:30 p.m. | SAP’s newest cloud platform is an on-demand Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering to help enterprise customers and partners build, deploy, and manage their enterprise applications in the cloud. The platform provides access to a development platform and a highly scalable, secure, and flexible runtime environment on which the customers' enterprise, mission-critical applications can be deployed and managed at the lowest possible TCO. This platform will support multiple programming languages and developer frameworks to maximize developer productivity and flexibility when developing on this platform. The platform will leverage industry leading SAP's in-memory HANA technology as its primary persistence layer to accelerate enterprise application performance. This platform offers a huge acceleration in time-to-value for customers and partners who can now focus primarily on their business requirements with no need for up-front investment, providing a very low risk and higher ROI option for customers and partners for their enterprise custom applications. | Education Session |
S046* | Next Generation Portals: On Premise, On Demand and On Device <b>**ADDITIONAL REGISTRATION REQUIRED**</b> | Mon., | 03:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. | <b>**ADDITIONAL REGISTRATION REQUIRED**</b><br><a href="http://bit.ly/2012StrategySessions" target="_blank">Click here to register</a><br><br>In this strategy session, discuss SAP's strategy around its NetWeaver Portal (in all possible channels of consumption), the traditional On-Premise Portal and where it is heading, and the challenge of mobilizing existing assets and the new world of on-demand portal. In this session we would like to hear from you what are your scenarios and requirements and share with you possible directions the NetWeaver Portal will be taking. | Education Session |
S047* | Secure and Compliant: Identity and Access Management with SAP <b>**ADDITIONAL REGISTRATION REQUIRED**</b> | Tue., | 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. | <b>**ADDITIONAL REGISTRATION REQUIRED**</b><br><a href="http://bit.ly/2012StrategySessions" target="_blank">Click here to register</a><br><br>Managing user roles and entitlements in a compliant way and securing access to mission critical business data is vital for every organization. With growing numbers of cloud applications in use in addition to classic business applications in your data centers, keeping control of user rights and enabling efficient provision of these rights is an important topic for IT departments. In this strategy session, learn directly from the experts about SAP’s portfolio for Identity and Access Management (including the recent addition of SAP NetWeaver Single Sign-On), SAP’s roadmap for this solution and its fit in SAP’s overall strategy. | Education Session |
3708 | How Coca-Cola Enabled Online Ordering and Service Ticket Generation for Its Customers | Tue., | 03:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. | What they did: Historically, the only mechanism for small and medium sized customers to order products or create service tickets for faulty equipment was over the telephone. CCE decided to provide a customer-empowered Internet-based online ordering and ticket-generation system. Standard reusable web services were built and consumed on the hosted Azure platform integrating SAP functionality. Business Benefit: Due to the nature of the application 1) The deployment process to the customers is very simple. 2) Intuitive application requires no formal training. 3) Support for the application is minimal. 4) The appliation eliminates current fax and phone orders, freeing up resources. | Education Session |
S050 | Application Development in the Cloud: SAP’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Offering <b>**ADDITIONAL REGISTRATION REQUIRED**</b> | Tue., | 03:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. | <b>**ADDITIONAL REGISTRATION REQUIRED**</b><br><a href="http://bit.ly/2012StrategySessions" target="_blank">Click here to register</a><br><br>Strategy Session: SAP will officially release SAP NetWeaver Neo, its PaaS offering that has been in beta shipment mode since November 2011 in Q2/2012. In this session, you will get insight into the available platform capabilities, SAP’s vision and roadmap for the solution and the relation to other SAP offerings in the cloud and on-premise. Make sure you take this opportunity to get first-hand information on this exciting option to complement your packaged application portfolio with differentiating custom built applications in the cloud. Also learn about the options for SAP partners to create business by building and running Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications on this platform and by selling these applications. | Education Session |
2114 | External Facing Portal: Solution That Fits Your Needs | Wed., | 04:15 p.m. - 05:15 p.m. | External facing portals are business enablers. They provide a communication channel and simplify business with customers, partners, suppliers, recruitment candidates, and citizens. SAP NetWeaver Portal and SAP’s on-demand portal technology are two valuable solutions for many types of external portals and sites. What is the right solution for your needs? On demand or on premise? Who will manage the content? What level of customization is required? Know what are available SAP solutions, their benefits, and matching business scenarios. Understand considerations for choosing theright solution or mix of them for your use case. Learn from real-world examples of external facing portals. | Education Session |
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