INDUS – SAP Digital Day (19^th April 2017, Mumbai, India)

As a SAP Mentor, I’d like to share the experience of attending the INDUS – SAP Digital Day event recently concluded in Mumbai, India, on 19^th April 2017. The event was organized by the Indus Community in collaboration with ‘live Mint’ India.

Before we get into the event details, let me quickly give a short introduction about the INDUS community.

INDUS (Indian Users of SAP) is the SAP User group for the Indian sub-continent whose mission is to help SAP customers make the most of their investments in SAP. We are one of the fastest growing independent communities of SAP business users and CIO’s in the world. We have more than 850 corporate members with more than 3500 individuals representing all industries and various business functions. (Source: http://www.induscommunity.com/pages/about-us). The community is spearheaded by Mr. Mukesh Chowksi (President – Home Improvement. Supply Chain & IT at Asian Paints Ltd.).

Alright, so now about the great stuff that entailed this power packed event.

Here is the episode by episode details of the great event:

Welcome note and Introduction by Bernd Leukert (Member of the Executive Board at SAP, Products & Innovation)

Some startling revelation by Bernd– ‘global impact of digital transformation is likely to be 3-4 times bigger than that of e-commerce – Global impact of digital transformation – at a whopping $70 trillion’! It was enticing to hear Bernd speak about how Digital is changing the world around us and how SAP is committed to build professional skills not only in its own products but in other technology trends as well, to ensure learning becomes an integral part of ‘digital transformation’! One important remark by Bernd for India was that SAP began contributing to the Indian Government’s ‘Digital India’ vision ‘even before the actual initiative was formally announced’ – as always ahead in the game!

Below is a list of topics which were delivered as part of the Agenda for the day by SAP Products & Innovation Leadership:

• SAP’s vision on user experience – Sam Yen
• Update on S/4 HANA and S/4 HANA Industry cloud – Weiland Schreiner and Christoph Behrendt
• SAP’s vision and investments in IoT – Tanja Reuckert
• SAP’s vision and investments in Analytics & Big Data – Mala Anand, Raymie Stata & Franz Faerber
• SAP’s foray or approach to Machine Learning & Innovation Journey – Juergen Mueller
• SAP’s vision on why HCP will be the next big thing – Bjoern Goercke

My thoughts as a SAP Mentor:

It is extremely encouraging, motivating and assuring that SAP executives with such a busy schedule still make time for the Mentors. Great words for Mentors from the SAP executives like – ‘Biggest Influencers of SAP’, “Voice of SAP”, “SAP Mentors are the people who understand the SAP Products the best” and the executives themselves being through the mentor journey proudly saying that they too got a Mentor Tee J and they’re always happy to support mentors – is the best thing you could get to hear from the SAP Leadership!! Awesome support!

For APJ SAP community, great suggestions by @Sam Yen and @ Bjorn Goerke to increase the Mentor presence and collaboration – ‘Create awareness and connect more with the community’

The event also gave me an opportunity to discuss several Mentor initiatives for 2017 and onwards in the APJ region with Shilpa and brainstorm on how we can engage and collaborate more within the community to have more awareness and traction through the Mentor program – Things have already started rolling with Planning in progress on these initiatives!

The ultimate moment for me was – got a chance to meet and click with Gerhard Oswald, a former member of the SAP Executive Board, who played a significant role in driving SAP India’s growth during his tenure at SAP.  Could not ask for more!

Takeaways from the event:

• SAP is committed to invest in India’s Digital journey
• SAP is aware of the Indian government’s ‘Digital India’ initiative and has planned to heavily invest in it.
• IOT, ML, AI are the technologies which are going to disrupt the way things are connected and how intelligence is derived through connected things – SAP to invest $2 billion in next 5 years in IOT
• India’s IOT market size expected to increase 7 times – from $1.3 billion to $15 billion by 2020!
• SAP is heavily investing in their Cloud platform, now known as SAP Cloud Platform
• S/4 HANA is one of the biggest transformation from SAP and there are now several successful Customer stories on S/4 HANA transformation
• YAAS – Hybris as a Service to be one of the most open platform for developers to build apps.
• One thing is clear – Every product will be become a service in coming time
• Customers are eagerly looking towards SAP to understand how SAP can help them to turn their Products into Services to become more Customer focused and enhance the experience
• Customer Engagement Technology will remain at the forefront of Digital Transformation
• Great example quoted by Carsten Thoma (President SAP Hybris CEC) about the role of technology in digitally transforming businesses – “Uber, Air BnB and Facebook – all three have ‘Zero’ in common & this zero is worth more than $ 400 billion!! Uber (World’s largest transportation company) has zero Cars, Air BnB (world’s largest rental accommodation provider) has zero Real Estate and Facebook (world’s largest social media content platform) creates zero Content” – Every single business model of that $ 400 billion is driven by pure technology and digital transformation at heart – That’s the power of Digital Technology and Digital transformation!!
• The Digital force will completely transform the way things are done today in a very short span of time.

We plan to follow the suggestions going forward in the APJ region – You will get to see a lot more collaboration, events, and more good stuff coming from the APJ Mentor community in future!

I’m humbly thankful to SAP and the ecosystem which I’m a proud member of for having this wonderful group called the ‘SAP Mentors’  – always eager to engage with executives, with peers and more importantly with the larger ecosystem and the community to help, collaborate and build a better SAP world!

After this event – The kind words we got as feedback for being SAP Mentors by the SAP Senior Leadership team and what they would like to see more from us in future, is highly encouraging and I feel all geared up to collaborate and contribute as much as possible to the community – be it through events like INDUS, SITs, TechEds, Ecosystem, SAPPHIRE ASUG etc.

Some awesome moments captured with SAP Executives:

By the way, during the event, I got to meet @Rahul Sachdeva (SAP University Alliances Head) and I was fortunate to be offered by him an opportunity to be on the judges’ panel of the exciting #NASA #Spaceapps Challenge which was organized by the #SAP NextGen Team under Rahul’s leadership @ the SAP Labs, Whitefield, Bangalore campus.

I will soon share a blog on that high adrenaline, full of energy and ideas, some great young minds brainstorming together in teams in the non-stop 48 hours hackathon!! Stay tuned for more on this even in the next blog.

Thank you everyone for giving this a read!

BR

Ankur