Thoughts from SAP TechEd: An inspiring time to be in Berlin
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SAP TechEd was held last week in Berlin; a great technology event in the midst of a city celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down. I was lucky enough to arrive early enough to have a few hours to explore the city and soak in the historic celebration. Berlin was a fantastic city to host this year’s event, and the powerful 9km long trail of 8000 balloons and hundreds of thousands of visitors made it even more incredible. It amazes me how far we have come in only 25 years. A quick stop at CheckPoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz gave me a good dose of perspective to start the busy week. My week in Berlin was very memorable for many reasons, here are a few of my personal highlights. |
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Mobile Secure Featured in the Keynote demo
The Mobile Secure team was again highlighted in the keynote demo as Bjorn Goerke demonstrated the SAP Mobile Secure Fiori Build Service. His story resonated with many attendees who are eager to find ways to simplify the deployment of mobile apps, in this case an SAP Fiori app that was customized, configured, (could be wrapped) and then published to Mobile Place in a matter of 3 or 4 minutes (without coding!). The solution, set to be released by the end of the year, drew a lot of attention as SAP Mobile Secure helps simplify Fiori rollouts. The full demo can be watched here.
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Customer perspectives From many conversations on the show floor, I realized that every customer’s journey to mobilize their business vary widely. A large number of customers (almost everyone I talked to) are evaluating SAP Fiori and have a strong interest in simplification both at the application and connectivity level. The importance of the story we have been sharing for the past few months became abundantly clear: Mobile security today is no longer about strictly controlling access to corporate systems and enforcing policies at the device level. Instead it is about ensuring mobile apps are delivered to users in a simple way. |
The Mobile team: Holger Gauss, Martijn Tielen, Britt Womelsdorf, Dennis Richards, Milja Gillespie and Jim Jaquet. |
Talking with the Roaming Reporter
A short video interview with Senthil Krishnapillai summarizes many of the conversations and the importance of simplicity for IT and end users. Simplicity is a key theme going forward and was demonstrated with the recent launch of Mobile Place, our multi-channel enterprise app store, the Mobile Secure Fiori Build Service as well as the work we do with Mocana to simplify the connectivity experience to back end systems.
Customer Roundtable Featuring Colgate-Palmolive
One of the highlights for me was a fantastic roundtable discussion with Jason Russo of Colgate-Palmolive. Jason shared Colgate’s mobile journey – specifically the successful rollout of SAP Mobile App Protection by Mocana and Mocana Atlas to secure and drive employee usage of the company’s 50 mobile apps. His story highlighted the incredible things that can result from co-innovation. You certainly can’t beat having been in the room for this engaging discussion, but if you want to catch the highlights you can listen to Colgate’s case study on our recent webinar here. The best part for me was recognizing that all of the customers in the room are facing very similar challenges – they’re deploying SAP Fiori UX and want to simplify the connectivity experience. A challenge that SAP Mobile App Protection can help to solve.
Cocktail Reception at the Pan Am Lounge
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The most interesting corporate event that I’ve ever attended was a cocktail reception hosted by our partner Mocana at the Pam Am Lounge. The venue itself is worth commenting on. This was an apartment building that was the “home away from home” for Pam Am flight attendants and pilots in the 60s and 70s. “Stewardesses” served cocktails in original uniforms and the apartment sparkled in its original décor. We enjoyed a fantastic turnout of customers eager to continue their conversations from the conference and roundtable. Most conversations were based on the activity SAP and Mocana have been working on as we jointly deliver a solution to elegantly mobilize SAP Business Suite via SAP Fiori UX. Just before the conference, Mocana announced how SAP Mobile App Protection pairs with Mocana Atlas. I also wrote a separate blog about it here. Both SAP and Mocana were recently featured in a Gartner report that showcases a customer implementation of this solution. The report will be available from SAP soon. |
Overall the conference was a fantastic event full of great conversations, demos, history and more. If you missed it we’ll hope to see you next year!