Snap Judgment – SAP Inside Track St. Louis, July 12, 2013

After a brief hiatus (see my 2010 and 2011 recaps) SAP Inside Track returned to St. Louis today. Let’s get into it.

Breakfast & Icebreaker

Big thanks to Mercy Health and SAP for sponsoring this event. Hopefully we’ll see some of our ice-breaker app ideas work out. Also, I’m apparently the only person involved in this event who hasn’t published a book. Under my own name, anyway.

There’s just no making some people happy.

Building Applications which leverage SAP HANA – Thomas Jung

In the few years since he’s been here, Tom has gotten even better at holding a room of mismatched technical-types and keeping them tentative and focused. And I think I’ve found out his secret.

Definitely it’s the beard.

Regarding his actual content, the key takeaway here is that everyone should immediately start pushing their code into the database, because ABAP is stupid (I’m paraphrasing) (and wrong). But really you should start doing more stuff in your database. Especially if that database is HANA. And if your database isn’t HANA, this guy would like to sell you some.

SAP Lumira – Eric Vallo

Key takeaways? SAP Lumira (formerly Visual Intelligence) (colloquially Visi) is beefy – it can crunch BIG numbers for a desktop tool. Also? Not really for everyone in your organization to play with (for more, check this). Also? Quintuplecorn magical.

CRM: Rapid Application Builder in Depth – Stephen Johannes

Putting his customer-centric skills to the test, Stephen started his presentation off with frozen custard!

After that it was a string of TLAs that seemed to make sense to everyone else in the room. We’ll call this session a win.

Time to Go to BI4? – Eric Vallo

Short answer? Yes.

Big Finish

Turns out that putting together an SAP Inside Track can be good for both mind and body.

Thanks again to our speakers, organizers, and supporting crew. See you back ’round herre.