After 10 years of abstinence I returned to SAPTECHED this year. I didn't attend a TechEd for the last 10 years cause I decided that the benefit was not worth the money. So I was very curious if my perception would change.
The Location
Before I write about my impressions regarding the content of this event I first want to write about the location. I've been to SAP TechEd Vienna, Berlin and Amsterdam (2x) before. I liked all of the other locations more than Barcelona. I'm talking about the exhibition area, not the city. The location is far too big for this event, the ways are much too long. As far as I remember the other locations were smaller.
The Keynote
One of the highlights of former TechEds was the Keynote (except the one with Leo Apotheker in 2008?). This year I was curious if Björn Goerke would perform as he did the last years. He didn't but that was not a disappointment.I came here to pick up information about current and upcoming technologies and SAP products.
He started very promising with an introduction into Intelligent Enterprise. This was a talk about Cloud platform, CF, API Hub, FaaS and all those cool things. I thought: yes that's the way we have to lead our customers (SAP's and mine) to new technologies, not because new technologies are cool but cause new technologies open up new approaches to business problems.
Then he interviewed this 17 year old girl Alyssa Carson who has taken part in multiple NASA space camps and expressed her desire to take part in a mission to Mars. and I thought again. Yes, tell your customers that we all need a fresh wind with new ideas from young people or people with young and open minds that push SAP technology to new dimensions. He strengthened this perception by encouraging the audience to be always curious.
At the end he mentioned and presented ABAP on Cloud Platform. I knew this would come but nevertheless it was a disappointment for me (imy personal view). ABAP is a language that was created in 197x and is not suited for modern programming paradigms.
SAP Cloud platform would have been a chance to tell all the ABAP geeks: Move to a more modern language with a much broader community and therefore much more innovation.
The Sessions
The first sessions I visited then were not very interesting. This of course is not the fault of SAP. I just chose the wrong sessions out of the huge amount.
In the afternoon I changed my strategy and visited some shorter sessions in the Talk Theaters,, the Roadmap Rooms and I attended a mini CodeJam about Cloud Workflow service.
Especially the roadmap of SAP WebIDE and the one of CoPilot were extremely interesting and produced an optimistic view for the next two days.
I asked for the Typescript support of WebIDE and was told that this will come and the Copilot will change the way we work in the future. Not within the next two years but in the longer future.
After work party
When the official day finished we had a drink at the exhibition area and afterwards we met with a few fellows at a tapas bar. There I got some additional news about the new cloud programming model from gregorw. This infos convinced me that SAP is definitely not returning to the stone age of IT in spite of pushing ABAP to the cloud (thanks for that).
So I will sleep well after a day full of ups and downs and I'm looking forward to the second SAPTECHED day.
