Introducing the New SAP Mentors Fall 2013!

It was, is and always will be a balancing act to select new SAP Mentors. I feel it’s getting harder, with every year the initiative gets more prominence in the SAP ecosystem, and with that it really makes a huge difference for people who’ve been selected. And also for all the amazing SAP experts who didn’t make it…this time.

Sometimes I might get an email that says, “Look how many points I have on SCN, you have to make me an SAP Mentor now.” I think that’s because some people believe mentorship is the pinnacle of what gets measured via the point system on SCN.

It is not.

We SAP Mentors created an SAP Mentor Magic Foundation document as a way for people to better understand the driving force behind being an SAP Mentor.

Let me try to describe it another way. When the inventor of modern computing Doug Engelbart was a young man, he created the following life principle:

     Let me design a professional goal which will maximize the contribution my career can have to mankind!

Doug Engelbart’s life principle translates quite nicely to being an SAP Mentor: As an SAP Mentor I focus on how I can maximize my contributions to the larger SAP community.

Yesterday, for example, Tom Cenens shared his journey of Influencing SAP Certification & Education. There, the spirit of mentorship really comes across. Tom is truly fulfilling the promise of us SAP Mentors. If you read his account, you realize that much of his work is in the background and invisible for most people. That’s true for many SAP Mentors.

Another criteria for selecting someone relate to our mission of being inclusive. We also look to fill gaps in areas of expertise, as well as to find people in locations where SAP Mentors could really add a lot to their local or regional scene. And we’ve tried to balance all these criteria with our new selections.

Without further ado it’s my pleasure to introduce everyone to this year’s new SAP Mentors:

Eduardo Chagas, John Deere Brazil

Eduardo has been part of the top three contributors in the Portuguese SCN space for three years in a row. He works for John Deere, which is a very innovative customer of SAP: The company was the first in the world to go live with Business Suite on HANA. He is also an expert in SAP NFE. He has even been invited by SAP to teach the SAP NFE academy classes. He’s not just an expert; he’s also a sharer of his knowledge. His desire to share knowledge goes beyond SCN at ASUG meetings and in SAP Education classes, where he’s an official instructor.

Sharon Newton, hyperCision USA

Sharon is the CEO of hyperCision, an SAP and SuccessFactors partner. She has deep expertise in SAP HCM, SuccessFactors Learning and the integration of cloud with on-premise applications. She co-authored the book SAP Enterprise Learning and created popular compliance solutions for customers. She is a well respected thought leader and consistently educates customers via her talks at SAP events including TechEd, FKOM, Sapphire, SAP Insider US, SAP Insider Europe and HR Technology Conference. She has identified gaps in SAP solutions and built key technologies and applications to solve customers problems in the US, Europe and Africa. She has more points on SCN, we are consolidating other users with this new one.

Alex Papagiannidis Rivet, Molson Canada

Alex is a Canadian SAP customer working for Molson North America’s oldest Brewery. He speaks French and works from Montreal, representing the SAP Beverage industry and acting as a BI Partner/Liaison with the business side of Molson Coors. They use the full suite of BI products, including Analytics, Mobile BI and HANA. Alex presented at the first BI4 Elite training in Vancouver last year and he spoke at the ASUG annual conference about how BI helps Molson Coors sell beer. He is planning to discuss his HANA story at the upcoming SAP TechEd in Las Vegas. Title: “Looking at one source of the truth with Design Studio Mobile on HANA ” He also took time to present two sessions on Molson’s use of BPC and BI during SAPPHIRE this year.

John Patterson, Australia

John works a lot on UI5 and Gateway. He’s among the few who jumped early into these technologies, have a play with them and share their experiences. Some things that John brings: Ease of approach, enthusiasm, being a pioneer and knowledge sharing. He brings passion into discussions and tries to explain whatever he knows. His blogs and tweets reflect that.

John has spent the last 15 years working as an SAP user and system integrator. He started his SAP career in the mid-late 90’s as a web developer cutting his teeth rolling DCOM, CORBA and RMI SAP connectors. Technology and techniques have come and gone but the customers—and their requirements and problems—have stayed the same. John doesn’t just touch new technology: he pushes it beyond the usual boundaries and is happy to share his learning.

Nicolas Busson, NB-Conseil France/Switzerland

Nicolas is at heart an application consultant in the CRM space, but is at home on the technical side as well, as attested by his involvement in a couple of code-exchange projects. He has long-standing expertise in CRM and is now learning how HANA will open up new possibilities in the customer relationship area. He is a very engaged member of the community. He did some wonderful work in spreading awareness about the latest SAP CRM technologies in France. He recently left France and took a job in Switzerland.

Stephen Lofthouse, Sheffield Hallam University UK

Stephen has taught ERP using the standard SAP University Alliances (UA) curricula for several years. He has helped design SAP UA Business ByDesign and Cloud curriculum. He acted as the UA spokesman on cloud issues and is one of two speakers on our Business ByDesign training video and course. Stephen is not only technically proficient, but he is also an excellent ambassador and spokesperson stimulating young minds to become aware of SAP as a career path. He is skilled as a speaker and presenter as well as an educator.

Steve Bogner, Insight Consulting Partners US

Steve is one of the most knowledgeable SAP payroll consultants. Starting in 1994 (and even before that) he spent many years in the payroll field. He has a wide breath of knowledge across a wide range of industries. Steve founded the SAP HR Insights podcast, which in and of itself is a huge contribution to the community.

He is the go-to expert in the area of SAP Payroll, in no small part because of his numerous conference presentations. Moreover, he’s just a good guy. His calm wisdom makes him someone who the community can be proud to consider as a Mentor. He has a newsletter for SAP HR customers and also has a blog following. He works well with customers and is always looking to improve SAP customers’ experience.

Wences Lacaze, Argentina

Wences is a functional application lifecycle management consultant and a specialist with SAP Solution Manager and CRM, Enterprise Portal products. He shared several very detailed functional documents on SCN and SlideShare. He’s a very experienced and engaging consultant who many customers know well.

As Blag has left Peru many years ago, our only other South American SAP Mentors were from Brazil. It makes us happy to add Argentina to the list of countries that now have SAP Mentor representation. Interestingly, I found out after speaking with him that he’s working for a Chilean consulting company that has sent him to Mexico on a project focused on transportation. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico. Wow, looks like we have the South American continent covered. 😉

Klaus Freyburger, Hochschule Ludwigshafen am Rhein Germany                                            

Dr. Klaus Freyburger, who teaches at Hochschule Ludwigshafen am Rhein, is one of the SAP University Alliance’s most visionary members. His focus is SAP HANA, Analytics and Sentiment Analysis with SAP HANA. Together with his students and SAP he created several amazing applications, such as the SAP Data Base of Dream which was presented at SAPPHIRENOW 2013, and the Sentiment Analysis of the American Election (based on HANA), which was presented at SAP TechEd 2012. He works with a blended learning approach: Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) plus co-innovation projects.

Mahesh Kumar, Rolta India Limited  India

Mahesh is a BW, BOBJ, HANA expert with more than 10 years’ experience in SAP consulting and very strong subject matter expertise in the business intelligence and analytics domains. Manesh is highly effective in customer interaction roles, and has a solid knowledge of SAP technical and presentation skills. Today he likes taking on challenging roles and projects: one immediate example of this is his current work on SAP HANA proof of concepts. He writes these elaborated blog posts, where you think he has a team of researchers behind him. Like this one Big Data Technologies & Applications where he compares the data structure of SAP, IBM, Oracle, SAS, Open Source. When I asked him about it he said, that the best way to understand is to share, you research deeper. Really cool.

Aviad Rivlin, SAP Israel

Aviad is a product manager for the SAP Portal. He’s also a driving force behind the new mobile portal product known by the name Portal On. As SAP regained its love of portals, everything with a web-based (HTML5!) UI/UX is touched by portals. This includes Neo, HANA, Cloud, HEC, HCP. Aviad is an expert on UI technologies and mobility. He’s an extremely talented and creative individual who has customers’ interests at heart. Aviad knows tech, but also the functional side very well.

Agasthuri Doss, SAP Australia

Agasthuri is a Senior Integration Architect with SAP Australia. He has more than 15 years of SAP experience in system architecture, planning, development and production support of ERP-based implementation. Agasthuri is very active on the SCN PI forum both as a moderator and as a contributor. He has also completed the mammoth task of cleaning up the PI Wiki space, deleting old/obsolete content, etc. He has been a frequent speaker at SAP TechEd and other SAP events.

I am really excited about them joining the SAP Mentor wolf pack. If you’d like to meet them online, we are having two public SAP Mentor Webinars next week October 8th 10am + 9pm PST, where the new Mentors will introduce themselves and share one piece of advice during that session. Hope you can join. Personally I can’t wait!

SAP Connect Session: https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/sapmm +1-866-312-7353

Participant Passcode: 170 133 7730

SAP Mentor Monday additional dial-in information