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Author's profile photo Marian Harris
Marian Harris
October 23, 2014 3 minute read

Paper Planes & Cloud Adoption Made Simple – Just another Tuesday Night at TechEd && d-code Las Vegas!

Update – See more pictures from our photo uploads here!
As an attendee and presenter at SAP conferences featuring the latest in serious enterprise software innovations, you come to expect a certain environment  when you arrive.  But then the unexpected happens… You walk into a room filled with smiling people, even laughing. Some people wave their hands wildly as they enthusiastically talk with their peers.

And then a paper airplane whizzes by narrowly missing your head…

Then another plane whizzes by – even hits you.

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You might think you took a wrong turn into a co-located conference for some “other industry” at the farthest, most opposite spectrum of Enterprise IT.  That is, until you catch faint sound bites of their conversations;

  • “…  onboarding to the cloud”
  • “… integrating our ERP to Successfactors”
  •   “… data security and governance in the cloud”
  •   “…should we ‘go hybrid’ or should we ‘run our apps side-by-side?’”

Surely, you’re in the right place.  And then, another paper plane whizzes by.  That’s when you realize that you’re witnessing IT exces hard at play – but having fun while doing it!

Last Tuesday night at SAP TechEd && d-code Las Vegas, over 100 IT executives embarked on a quest to learn how to fly to the SAP cloud faster than ever – hosted by Bjoern Goerke, EVP & Corporate Officer, SAP Product & Innovation Technology, SAP SE, and with Elvira Wallis, SVP, SAP Solution and Knowledge Packaging. 

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This is serious business.  Yet participants were hard at play to discover SAP’s best kept secret – how to fly to the cloud faster and smarter than ever by leveraging the best business and IT practices in SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions and expert enablement from openSAP.  Straight from the experts.

For free. Really – you can check them out now at http://service.sap.com/public/rds-cloud and http://open.sap.com.

The evening highlights included executive addresses from Bjoern Goerke and Elvira Wallis, with implementation stories presented by Coeus Consulting about KARL STORZ North America’s SuccessFactors integration with SAP ERP HCM, and project lessons learned from Praveen Kaushik, HCM Consulting Principal at Infosys.  They unveiled tips for cloud deployment success and how to leverage packaged RDS solutions for simplified cloud innovation adoption.  Further, Elvira and Bjoern spoke about openSAP’s offering for Cloud related enablement in a cutting edge Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) format.

SAP provides the downloadable content, enablement and project tools at no additional cost to help  companies prepare, integrate and operate enterprise solutions in  the cloud based on the lessons learned from the experts pioneering the way before them.

It’s cloud innovation adoption made simple. 

At each of the expert Cloud stations, attendees had a chance to dig  a bit deeper in a unique blend of gamified education delivered in two interactive games:

STEP 1: In the first step, attendees completed and filed their “Cloud Flight Plan” which required answering questions about Cloud onboarding basics & supporting tools.  Completing this step allowed participants to win valuable prizes at each Cloud station, and to level up to game #2, the “Ultimate Flight Challenge”

STEP 2:  In game #2, attendees could pit their aeronautical engineering skills against their peers in a duel of paper airplane flight to “Cloud Nine”.  But this is nothing like the simpmle paper airplanes you all flew in elementary school.  Take it from John Collins, “The Paper Airplane Guy”, and Guinness World Record Holder for longest airplane flight.  These are aerodynamically engineered flying machines with all “the right stuff” to hit the “Cloud Nine” target faster than ever for fun prizes including a really cool limited edition McLaren model race car, and many remote control aircrafts.

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(Pictured above: Attendees queue up to get expert instruction in folding their airplanes)

Throughout the night, over 110 participants made 300+ “flights to the cloud” in engaging games, and learned SAP’s best kept secret for cloud adoption made simple. 

Only now it’s not a secret!  Get the inside scoop on SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions and  openSAP at:

Happy flying!

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