#SAPtd is almost here: Welcome the New SAP Mentors Fall 2014

Update: This Wednesday get to know them by joining the two public SAP Mentor Webinar 9am and 9pm PST Wednesday 29th of October. Link to SAP Connect Session: https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/sapmm +1-866-312-7353 Participant Passcode: 170 133 7730 [More dial in numbers]

Cloning will be invented one day at an SAP InnoJam just before a SAP TechEd && d-code #SAPtd, because a geek will be fed up to miss so many things going on in parallel at that event.

Yes in just over a week many of us will be in Las Vegas for the annual SAP TechEd && d-code. I thought before the schedule was packed, but now with all the d-code activities added, it explodes. Check out the webinar recording where SAP Mentors are giving tips and tricks on how to make the best out of your time there. If you register just now, use the discount code dwb14 for $100 off and a $100 donation to Doctors Without Borders, which the SCN community is continuously supporting. 

For SAP Mentors it is an even tighter schedule, as there will also be many interesting meetings with SAP Executives and product teams scheduled throughout the week. They are a voice of the community, see the SAP Mentor Magic Foundation document.

If there are things that you would like the SAP Mentors to discuss with the executives, please reach out to any of us, so that we can better prepare.

When we add new SAP Mentors, others become SAP Mentor elders and join the actually quite active SAP Mentor Alumni ranks.  In the last years the following SAP Mentors have done amazing things to improve all of our SAP world. Please join me in thanking them for all they have done: Abesh Bhattacharjee Bruce Armstrong Joerg Nalik  Joseph Zeinoun Krishnakumar Ramamoorthy Otto Gold Paula Rosenblum Philip Kisloff Prashant Mendki Shabarish Vijayakumar Shengtao Tan Sina Moatamed Sue Dunnell Tridip Chakraborthy Vance Pan Vitaliy Rudnytskiy Yakov Werde.

To the new SAP Mentor Alumni I call out: “Don’t be strangers”. Take the example of Stephen Johannes who continues to have quite an active voice in the SAP community. It looks like he really enjoys that position of having done his term, but happy to chime in with his constructive opinion. Thank you!

Here are the new SAP Mentors.

But wait, before I can introduce the new SAP Mentors, there was a mystery SAP Mentor on the last announcement, who has never been revealed. Drum roll please:

Lestor Medows Kimberley Clark; Australia

Lestor is a very experienced BI manager who is a visionary, is innovative and has a passion for BI. He has for many years shared the journey of building up his companies BI center of excellence at the global level and has been a long term contributor to the SAP BI Community. Check out this video conversation with Timo Elliott around Mobile BI. He is also part of the SAP APJ strategic advisory council.

There is a perception that SAP Mentors only cover SAP technology, as the SAP Mentor initiative grew out of the SAP Developer Network, that once was true, but we have grown way beyond that and Lestor is a strong addition to the more application focused side of the SAP Mentors.

Right, so then, here are the new SAP Mentors:

Alessandro Iannacci TechEdge Group; Italy

Technical expert with more than 15 years of experience in the IT area, 4 in SAP. He is mostly involved in Mobile, Cloud 4 Customer, NetWeaver Application Server, HANA and HANA Cloud. Alessandro collaborates on many SAP community projects on GitHub (before that on Code Exchange), such as abap2xlsx, saplink, abap2gapps, abap2oauth, and is the founder of the Google API Client ABAP. Recently Ivan Femia has moved from Italy to Chicago, it is therefore great to have a new SAP Mentor based out of Italy.

Chris Rae Super Retail Group; Australia

Chris is a development manager and thought leader in the ERP space and has spoken at SAUG conferences and won the Demo Jam at Mastering SAP Tech in 2014. He has a no nonsense attitude that is refreshing in the ERP world. He has extensive client side experience in making an ERP system do what he wants.

Colleen Lee Individual Consultant;  Australia

Colleen is a longtime consultant in SAP security and GRC, and she actively shares her expertise on SCN. She is very good about responding to questions, even when she does not have a GRC system at her disposal to test out the scenario. Colleen was recently named SCN Member of the Month, and she has been atop the GRC space 12 month Leaderboard for many months. Within the past year Colleen has published several blogs and documents that were very well received, and she is very active in the GRC and Security discussion forums. She is already mentoring the newcomers.

Fredrik Ohlsson Tetrapack; Singapore

Fredrik is a well-respected leader and thought leader in business intelligence and a driver of innovation. He is a regular speaker in local BI related conferences and is a member of SAP’s APJ Strategic Advisory Council. He has a strong technical background in SAP BI including SAP BW, BusinessObjects and now driving implementations in Design Studio and Lumira. He is able to bridge the technical with the business solution world with ease.

Gareth Ryan The Config Team; UK

He is a very experienced SAP consultant who has become very active on SCN. Gareth is also reaching out beyond the the developer community outside of the SAP ecosystem and sharing cool stuff like UI5. From the nominations: “… he understands the business processes – not forgetting the perspective that IT is fundamentally there to support the business; not, just for IT sake. — He is always willing to share his time, knowledge and opinions with others. — I’m always amazed that, no matter what technology I come across there is a good chance he has already played with it and understands and has an opinion on why or where it should be used“

Mark Teichmann QSC; Germany

Mark is a senior consultant, active blogger and mobility expert working for QSC. He has held many sessions at different SAP Inside Tracks in Hamburg as well as in Manchester. This year he organized the ABAP CodeJam around ABAP in Eclipse the evening before the Hamburg SAP Inside Track.

Markus Theilen EWE AG; Germany

Since 2001 Mark is working as a developer and software architect. He is well known in the DSAG Development work goup. He is the co-author

of the ebook: Best Practice Leitfaden Development [German] Which gives practical tips around ABAP development. He is presenting the customer perspective at SAP TechEd && d-code in Berlin this year.

Marssel  Vilaça Individual Conslutant; Brazil

Marssel is an ERP SAP FI/CO Consultant and Trainer. He is extremely active in SCN in the Portuguese Community. He has been SCN Member of the Month in July 2013. Marsel is a SCN Topic Leader, and has a very good reputation with his peers and a large number of members of SCN. He was a speaker at the SAP Inside Track in Brazil. He is very respected by all the Brazilian mentors.

Mike Howles International Paper; USA

SAP BI Information Architect at International Paper. Consultants, customers and SAP alike admire his knowledge and willingness to share his expertise. Example: Design Studio 1.2/1.3 SDK – Design Studio Utility Pack. Comment: “Thank you so much for this blog. This is very cool. I specifically love that it is SOLUTION oriented. This is so organised and well described.” Catch Mike sharing is expertise at an ASUG session at SAP TechEd && d-code in Las Vegas.

Tamas Szirtes Intenzz; Netherland

Tamas is Director Innovation & Technology at Intenzz. He continuously invest time in providing very useful feedback to SAP’s products side by side with doing joint proof of concepts with SAP. Tamas is a VNSG (Dutch User Group) ambassador, is the secretary of the VNSG focus group User Experience, is one of the team members of the ‘SAP Inside Track NL organization’, and a semi-regular speaker at SAPPHIRENOW and SAPTechEd && d-code.

Muthu Ranganathan SAP Labs; India
Director Product Management at SAP: #bigdata & #digital usecases. Muthu is an Ex-Finance guy.  He writes really exquisite blog posts. On the side he is mentoring SAP Labs developers internally to improve their blogging too. He will help us create a closer relationship between the SAP Mentors in APJ and SAP Labs Bangalore.

Riley Rainey SAP; USA

Riley is Principal Mobile Architect, Consumer and Enterprise Applications at SAP. He is the Global Lead, SAP Mobile Platform Solutions Management in his role he is engaged in technical aspects of the SMP Platform with global SAP customers. Riley will foster a closer relationship between the SAP Mentors to the mobility teams within SAP.

Please join me in welcoming these new SAP Mentors at the two Public SAP Mentors Webinars on the 29th of October, the week after SAP TechEd && d-code Las Vegas.  Link to SAP Connect Session: https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/sapmm +1-866-312-7353 Participant Passcode: 170 133 7730 [More dial in numbers]

These are all great candidates, but I don’t think at the moment we are reaching our full potential of possible candidates from the SAP ecosystem worldwide. If this list reminded you of a person that is living the SAP Mentor Magic and isn’t an SAP Mentor yet, please nominate them for the next round in the spring. Independent of that we will think about how to broaden the net once the two SAP TechEd && d-codes are over.

You can always find out what the SAP Mentors are up to at http://sapmentors.sap.com including the List of  current SAP Mentors.