Last couple of weeks involved a lot of travel for me. Frankfurt-San Francisco. San Francisco Sydney. Sydney Singapore. Singapore Frankfurt. Frankfurt Heidelberg Apphaus. I was visiting key customers, prospects and analysts. Round the world in 11 days sounds cool, but I was pleased to get back.
Arriving at the Apphaus rather jet lagged, I was unsure what to expect from the hack day. Florian and Michaela had organized the event, with Craig Cmehil as MC, so I knew it would run well, but I wasn't sure what to expect from the demos. We had deliberately kept the brief vague.
The SAP Heidelberg apphaus is an ideal venue for this sort of event, great space for showcasing ideas and for coming up with them too. Congratulations to Toby, Daniel and team for developing the space. I could easily live there.
The quarterly release cycle means that every day counts, so it was great to see a good turn out of engineers and product managers to support the day. I'm learning that stepping away from the current release, or the plan for the next release is very important. Hack days are a good way to get out of the constraints of the day to day. It was a good opportunity to bring on-prem and cloud developers together too.
My takeaways from the Hackday.
1.All the hack demos are product worthy.
2. I will be asking the engineers to work with PM to figure out the way to turn the hacks into product. Expect to see the impact of the hack day in the product this year.
3. The demos hit the big themes. personal analytics, search, voice and security.
4. We will do this again this year.
5. I hope the teams take what they have done to the Berlin d-code event.
6. Demoing live product in 6 minutes is tough.
7. There is no shortage of innovation lurking in the corridors of SAP Germany. We need to do a better job of getting it out.
The winning entries scored VIP tickets for a sporting event of their choice at the SAP Arena, ool prize. I sense though, that the winner will be our products and customers. Congratulations to the winning team of Kai-Uwe Pielka; Antje Bredehoeft, Steffen Schroeder and Peter Stock, and to all the folks that contributed.
I'm looking forward to the next one.
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