NetWeaver Process Orchestration at Sapphire NOW 2013

I had the opportunity to attend another Sapphire this year and it was a good one. For this and many other purposes, I wanted to bring in some perspective on what was experienced on these 3 intense days around NetWeaver Process Orchestration. To start off, it was an intense week where we had the possibility to show, talk and brainstorm on Process Orchestration solution as SAP’s standard middleware solution, but more importantly to validate our current offering and direction with existing customers, partners and prospects.

Our customer testimonials

I will start with the 2 amazing sessions from 2 SAP customers: John Cuomo from Bank of America and Milt Simonds from AmerisourceBergen. They both showed how different industries (banking and pharmaceuticals accordingly) can apply SAP’s Middleware technology to different scenarios and bring return and value from these investments to their organizations in mission critical business processes. I will not spoil their thunder and let you see their sessions for yourselves. Watching their replays is worth your time guaranteed.

• Bank of America: Simplify Invoice Processing with SAP NetWeaver BPM (Blog and link to replay)
• AmerisourceBergen: Simplifying Complex Distribution Services (Blog and link to replay)

Our presence in the D&T Campus

As proud as we were with our guest speakers, we also had tremendous traffic and traction on the different floor presence stages. From the mini theater demo stations where we could demonstrate Process Orchestration in action in 20 minutes slots to our booth and discussion table, they all brought terrific benefits for all parties. I am still surprised by the amount of organizations that have not yet explored the extensive benefits of using a standards model driven middleware platform to simplify their landscape complexity and bring greater agility to their organizations. I really enjoyed explaining the breath of our solution across its different levels of abstractions from our SOA based services implemented with NetWeaver PI, extending these capabilities with NW BPM and NW BRM and topping it off with our B2B Add-On for Process Orchestration providing a full round and sounds unified stack to create large and complex value chain business processes demanded in today’s world. Our direction on a single unified stack was well received and it is a direction we will continue to support moving forward. NetWeaver Process Orchestration 7.31 is already getting widely used and we have seen a significant traction to start migrating to this version.

The new kid on the block: SAP Operational Process Intelligence powered by HANA

As you can imagine and expect, SAP customers, partners and prospects come to Sapphire to learn about not only the current state of the art, but also to track and validate trends and how the solutions they invest on are moving forward. This year, we introduced a new HANA based solution called SAP Operational Process Intelligence powered by HANA. This solution is a natural extension to NetWeaver Process Orchestration and it provides a greater degree of process visibility into real executable processes spawning multiple backend systems of record including NW BPM, NW PI and Business Suite. Very shortly we will support third party applications as well. This addresses a very specific and critical pain point where business stakeholders need a simplified and real-time perspective on their critical business processes. The ability for Operational Process Intelligence to create a phase value chain diagram with SLAs and state of the art dashboards stole the attention of every person walking our area. People could easily relate to the immediate value and validated this for us. We are expecting it to go out of Ramp-Up very shortly and get used extensively on our customer base for obvious reasons. We would be more than happy to provide more details if you did not have a chance to see it. We even have a HANA Experience presence that may facilitate understanding this solution in more detail.

In summary

I really enjoyed Sapphire this year. From my humble perspective, it was much better than last year. Not only we experience excellent traction for Process Orchestration, but the overall Technology message could be communicated more cohesively than years before. Part may be attributed to the internal efforts of better integration and experiences but a big factor should be attributed to listening and delivering on what customers want based on their feedback. SAP is putting their act together and this could be sense in the openness of our executives when engaging in public sessions with large audiences. This is a trend that is hard to ignore and something very promising to all SAP customers and soon to be!

For everyone interested to explore Process Orchestration technologies from SAP, and especially for those who could not join us in Orlando, we have launched a new webcast series. Lear more from this blog: Join us for the 2013 SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration Webcast Series.

We look forward to meeting you on our webinars!