In the trenches with SAP HANA - Day 2 in the Partner Center at SAPPHIRE NOW

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In anticipation of today’s keynote with Prof. Dr. h.c. Hasso Plattner, Chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board, and Dr. Vishal Sikka, Head of Technology and Innovation, Member of the Executive Board, Day 2 in the Partner Center at SAPPHIRE NOW featured a wealth of great content about the SAP HANA platform. SAP partners have been in the trenches with SAP, helping customers with their SAP HANA deployments since the beginning, and they have a wealth of experience, advice, tips, and tricks to share.

Erik Lillestolen, Solution Product Manager, SAP BI Appliances at HP, delivered a presentation about how to get the most out of your SAP HANA appliance software to speed up your business analytics.  If you missed it, you can catch the replay at SAPPHIRE NOW Online.

The microforums were abuzz with discussions about SAP HANA.  Clearly, customer interest is high, and they're looking to benefit from the experience of seasoned SAP HANA veterans.  Ruediger Haag of SAP Partner Ciber Inc. talked about how companies are currently using SAP HANA to substantially improve reporting and planning processes.  Dave Carlisle, Chief Application Architect, Enterprise Business IT for HP shared his hands-on experience with SAP HANA and easy techniques customers can use to drive business value like never before. 

Rob Fiorillo, SVP, Business Intelligence North America for intelligence, discussed how SAP HANA appliance software is changing business intelligence and how to change SAP BusinessObjects software to work with SAP HANA.  And Mark Albers, who leads the Hitachi Consulting HANA Center of Excellence gave advice on how to approach an SAP HANA deployment and shared how a leading consumer goods company was able to create a mobile solution for iPads using SAP in-memory computing technology and deliver it in less than five weeks.

If you saw this morning’s keynotes, you saw some live demos using the 100 TB SAP HANA database in Santa Clara.  Richard Travis, SAP Infrastructure Consultant with IBM, was on the team that built the system for SAP, and he talked about the challenges involved during a microforum that ran well over its 45 minute time slot.  He gave us a brief overview:

And Prem Swarup, Director, Analytics and Information Management with Wipro Technologies, hosted a lively discussion about how to build a use case for SAP HANA for your organization.  I can’t name names, but one attendee whose organization is using SAP Rapid Deployment Services as part of its SAP HANA rollout, stated emphatically that SAP RDS is not just smoke and mirrors –it really works as advertised.  Prem will repeat this session on Wednesday at 1 p.m. in the Partner Center, and gives a preview of what to expect:

One more day to go.  There’s a lot of content to experience, and even if you’re at the event in person, you can’t catch it all.  So remember to visit SAPPHIRE NOW Online for replays of the keynotes, presentations, and broadcast theater sessions.