My first SAP TechEd Experience!

Why/ How/ What does it take to attend 1st TechEd for FREE ?

If attending a TechEd is high for developers, attending as a contest ‘Winner’ with free entry was super-special to me. Here are my thoughts, takeaways and experiences on my first such TechEd event.

Being a developer I am more interested to know how things works rather than adopting a rule book and play by it. Something in me had always motivated across variety of topics to explore and to best use of the tech available open source.

My usual routine is to spend some time & effort in Developers Space mission and tutorials whenever I find some time apart from my professional work. So far I have completed 140+ of tutorials across SAP Cloud Platform, Cloud Foundry, APIs, Web Analytics, Web IDE, SAP UI5, Portal Site, Mobile Cards, Mendix, SAP Analytics Cloud, Odata, Microsoft Graph, CDS, ML and Block chain.

It was a blog post from Jerry Janda & Ian Thain , a contest was announced for winning a free showfloor pass of 100 each across all three venues Las Vegas, Barcelona and Bangalore. As part of the contest, entrants needed to complete a mission consisting of tutorials focused on SAP Cloud Platform workflows. Upon finishing the mission successfully, they became eligible for the free passes.

NOTE: The lucky winners will still need to cover travel, lodging, etc., – a show-floor pass is worth approximately $1,500 -not bad for taking tutorials that teach valuable information anyway.

That e-mail which made me HIGH

On 11th of September 2019, I received an email for SAP TechEd registration. It was surprise and happy to see that I am one among a lucky winner for the free pass to attend SAP’s biggest tech event in Bangalore. The joy was boundless since TechEd was always in my mind when my mentors and colleagues used to describe about the event and the takeaways from such a massive tech gathering. It was truly a dream come true moment for me, attending TechEd with my dear friend turned wife Swadini Sujanaranjan  🙂

All-set for the day! Much awaited confirmation mail… 

Post accepting the invitation, I did wait for 2 weeks for the public relations team to confirm if I really got through it or was it a dreamy spam? Once I got the confirmation and SAPTECHED ID to my e-mail, a week before the event I immediately shoot out an email to my reporting managers to inform about the same and confirmed my attendance towards the event.

Setting the tone for the next ‘3’ days!

On the ‘D’ day, 13th November 2019, reached early to BIEC (TechEd venue) to validate my registration. First to attend was the keynote session from SVP and MD of SAP Labs, Sindhu Gangadharan followed by CTO Juergen MUELLER. Keynote was as I imagined of a key event by Apple for products so as SAP to their software products. It was concise, crisp and to-the-point. Lots to observe from the way it was presented, executive key address from Alibaba Cloud and all the key agenda it included for the forthcoming days of the tech gathering.

Juergen Mueller set the pitch for the following days to come with multiple touch points over X-O coupled with intelligence, Developer Garage, Demo Pods, Product Roadmaps, Theatre and Lecture sessions.

App Space – Goodies – CHECK

Entering into the hall of tech expo, first to meet was Ian Thain / Meredith Hassett standing at the ‘App Space’ arena guiding techies for checkpoint prize to be won as goodies by completing tutorials relevant to Cloud Foundry, S/4 HANA Extensions, HANA Advanced Analytics, Google Cloud Run using CAP, CI/ CD from AWS, SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS image classifier core ML and SAP CP CF & Azure Service Broker (a nice cap / stylish wayfarer glasses/ Jerkin to mention few).

To mention few words about App Space experts from Google Cloud Kevin Nelson and Prof. Witalij Rudnicki , were brilliant on and off the floor. Easy to approach, simple in guidance, had a deep and informative discussion with both and of course they were ready for selfies as well. Kevin is my lucky aura, as and when he approaches with his super cool attitude he clears my errors in shell ( cloud computing) in a whisk and Vitaliy’s discussion bridged between ABAP and IoT worlds.

To all the wonderful people at AppSpace Rich Heilman Thomas Grassl Marius Obert  for making AppSpace/ Developer Garage more inclusive and interactive.

Musical night

SEL (Shankar – Ehsaan – Loy) set the stage on fire for the celebration night. With their electrifying performances for absolute 2-3 hours, Day 1 came to an end and we packed ourselves back to the hotels and home.

Day 2 was with defined agenda to get the most from the sessions

My area of interest and technical expertise is on C/4 HANA, Cloud Platform and CX. With Johannes Engelke Andreas Holzapfel and Ankit Joshi presented the C/4 HANA portfolio it was a eye-opener on bringing out the best suite on combination of the best-of-the-bests from the acquisitions in cloud practices. With Andreas explaining the brand value and social behavioral control over it amazed every audience in the room as it went further to impress more. Johannes gave a super quick demo in his own style of handling the kyma and kubernetes. He also made notes on K native, SIG membership and encouraged for contribution towards kyma project.

Roadmap session on SAP Cloud Platform of Mobile Services by Dr. Gerrard.

This one is close to my heart as and when Dr. Gerrard explained about the capabilities and potential of Mobile Services starting from the Sybase to the future, I was completely awe-struck. I was having a built-in iOS application on mobile cards to validate a case on field service management about the offline capabilities for an in-house proof of concept. He gave insights and feedback on the application model and explained about the delta sync, mobile transaction bridge (coolest feature to screen record and customize fields of our choice to build a mobile app) and introduced to WING (WebIDE Next Gen)

All demo’s instantly took the attention of audiences, few of my favorites are listed here:

• Demo Pods
  • Learning Hub – Registration for TechEd attendee exclusive
  • Web Analytics for ‘C’ level executives – Site Dynamics and simulation of spending characteristics on the go
  • C/4 Demo (Service Tickets – Introduction of custom field in UI)
  • Asset Management iOS (Notifying critical parameters by tracking the systems)
• Intelligent Enterprise Demo
  • Analysis of the entire system – Suggesting next-gen alternatives as a remedy (for ex: iRPA, etc.,)
• Creative IT
  • Topographic Simulation with XBOX, whereby simulating a flood-like scenario and what not. This can be best put in use for government institutions where tech meets service-to-the-community.

Day 3 was a bit relaxed, fun and quick meet with ‘The Energy Ball’.

Session on certification & training by Moulee cleared all my assumptions and whereabouts to get certified. This lecture session was full house despite of being the last day of TechEd. Useful insights and discounts were announced to encourage more and more participants to take up certification.

Quiz time at T1 (Theater 1) 4pm, vibrant and energetic hosts Maximilian Streifeneder & DJ Adams . (Let the drums roll, to make his dance entry on the floor). Meeting with this constant energy source ‘DJ Adams’ is one among my unforgettable moment. Being an SAP veteran since R/2 crossing more than 3 decades in SAP, DJ is so humble in sharing his experiences and life lessons with budding techies like us. Starting from his morning routine to his challenging times, he was very patiently answering our questions. A person to admire and derive energy from! Much thanks to Kim Mecca & Craig Cmehil  for arranging this meet with DJ, totally worth it.

We was there for PowerPoint Karaoke by Katarina Fischer , where random slides were presented and speaker should manage to interact with audience on the displayed content. It was totally new and super engaging to all of us as we thoroughly enjoyed it.

When it's monday and you are like:
(@qmacro @SAPCommunity @SAPTechEd #SAPTeched) pic.twitter.com/xxCPhkahhO

— Max Streifeneder (@maxstreifeneder) November 18, 2019

Takeaways from SAP TechEd,

• Be energetic
• Embrace the technology & Evolve with it
• On-Time healthy food
• Hydrate regularly
• Work towards your Goal
• Celebrate!

Feedback on SAP TechEd Bangalore 2019,

Brilliantly pulled and staged show with few shadowed glitches. Appreciable efforts from ground level staffs to demo-makers, developer advocates, speakers, public relations team and organizing committee. Way to go! Thanks to each one of You!

Source: Twitter (@Sygyzmundovych)

Thanks to my Cognizant management for their support in allowing me to participate and get the best out of TechEd.

Ending by the famous quote ‘Skills are cheap, Passion is priceless’, whether we are currently deployed in intelligent technologies are not, passion towards learning and boldness to learn from the failures will for sure GET RECOGNIZED. Thanks to Ian Thain / Jerry Janda / Thomas Grassl / Craig Cmehil / Kim Mecca and wonderful people out there who recognized me.

~ Vivek Raj Kumar M.