As all of you are aware SAP TechEd && d-code 2014 is in full swing by now ... and as hinted in my recent blog posts SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) was the linchpin of Steve Lucas' keynote and a central theme in bjoern.goerkekeynote. For those who were not able to attend in person or watch the replays just yet please find the respective links below - they are definitely worth watching!
With this blog post I want to provide sort of a transcript focusing on some of the HCP related talking points as well as provide further information and links.
Opening keynote by Steve Lucas
Making it real
Steve's keynote based on the theme "making it real" focused on three key elements:
- Amazing people
- Extraordinary things and
- Purposeful technology
This mix was more than just lip service, but actually the elements comprising his keynote, which featured many customers and partners (as well as SAP Mentors!) demoing their work and explaining how their solutions add business value. All-in-all it was an entertaining and insightful event and one that resonated well with the audience.
Intro to SAP HANA Cloud Platform
Given that Steve is the global president of SAP Platform Solutions Group it's not surprising that he focused on the platform story, or to be precise: SAP HANA Cloud Platform. For that purpose he invited prakash.darjion stage first to introduce SAP's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, its capabilities and value proposition. Prakash showed a brief demo of the SAP Web IDE emphasizing on the ease-of-use the toolkit provides to create compelling user interfaces that look good on all devices due to the responsiveness nature of the underlying technology (SAPUI5).
Partnership with MongoDB
Next on stage was vijay.vijayasankar, SAP Mentor Alumni and former SAP Executive, who's now running Global Channels and Business Development for MongoDB. Vijay announced the partnership between MongoDB and SAP aiming to closer integrate the NoSQL database with SAP's BI tools (such as SAP Lumira) as well as including ETL support for MongoDB into SAP's data services.
For further information please refer to the respective blog post: Delivering on the Big Data Vision: MongoDB and SAP partner to bring new value to joint customers.
Birst
As recently announced Birst and SAP have partnered to bring their analytical engine to SAP HANA Cloud Platform. In the context of SAP's cloud platform strategy it's vital to attract plenty of partners to offer their products on the platform to make it even more powerful and ultimately more attractive to customers. That applies to both technical capabilities (such as the analytical engine from Birst) as well as business solutions tailored for specific industries or lines of business. SAP's platform strategy certainly encourages partners to bring in their respective expertise to address white spaces in SAP's portfolio.
Further reading: Learn more about the solution in the SAP HANA Marketplace
Enterprise Jungle
The next gig on stage - Enterprise Jungle - is special in numerous ways! For one, they have been part of the SAP Startup Focus program (lead by aiaz.kazi and kaustav.mitra2) and seeing them on stage with a productive cloud solution on SAP HANA Cloud Platform is the best testimonial imaginable for the program (check out a video recorded last year at SAP TechEd) . Second, their team (comprising of SAP Mentor chris.paine and james.sinclair2) demoed the live product, which is the perfect example of one of the main usage scenarios for HCP: SaaS extensions. Their solutions extends the HR capabilities of Success Factors Employee Central by integrating other social platforms (e.g. Linkedin).
Further reading: Learn more about the solution in the SAP HANA Marketplace
There were further impressive demos including a very powerful show-case of SAP HANA's capabilities to analysis large datasets in sub-second response time (measuring in the browser!) performed by Bluefin's applebyj, yet as stated I'm focusing on the HCP related topics in this blog post. Fast forward to the next keynote...
Tuesday morning keynote by Björn Goerke
Intro
Björn's keynote was more focused on the technology that powers the digital transformation of business across the globe. Given that SAP TechEd && d-code traditionally attracts a more technical audience that makes perfect sense. His introductory words revolved about predictions made by famous science fiction authors of the past and how some of them have become a reality in the meanwhile (e.g. like personal transceivers = mobile phones). He then quoted Arthur C. Clark's famous statement about pushing the boundary of what's possible:
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
From there he lead over to SAP HANA as the next chapter in SAP's mission to bring real-time capabilities to business processes. He emphasized that in the last forty years SAP has created an entire economy around its products and that every evolutionary step in this evolution has brought significant opportunities not only for SAP, but the whole ecosystem. Björn then brought up Clarke's Law of Revolutionary Ideas:
"Every revolutionary idea – in Science, Politics, Art or whatever – evokes three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the three phrases:
1. It is completely impossible; don't waste my time.
2. It is possible, but it is not worth doing.
3. I said it was a good idea all along."
Björn hinted that some of SAP's competitors seem to have been through this very process during the last two years on multiple fronts (such as in-memory computing and cloud) while SAP has been fully committed to execute on our vision of SAP HANA as the underlying platform for real-time business applications and platforms.
Björn then continued to explain the new capabilities being rolled out with the HANA SPS 9 release scheduled for the end of this year. Covering that part alone would probably result in a full blog post by itself. Since I'm sure some of the usual suspects are already sharpening their pencils, I leave it up to them to cover the specifics in more detail elsewhere and continue with focusing on the PaaS related topics.
Cloud Strategy
The most anticipated part by many was when Björn started to talk about SAP's cloud strategy and especially the central role of HCP herein. The slide he presented surely looked a bit more polished then the version I shared with you in my SAP HANA Cloud Platform - Setting the stage (Part 2) post, yet the message could not have been any clearer: HCP is the designated cloud platform to build new solutions and to extend and integrate existing solutions. He explicitly encouraged the whole ecosystem to try out SAP HANA Cloud platform emphasizing on the free developer edition and free online training via openSAP.
Accenture
To demonstrate the capabilities of extending SaaS solutions Accenture was invited on stage to present one of their applications that seamlessly integrates with SuccessFactor's Employee Central. Tobias Bloch, VP North America of Accenture Software for Human Capital Management, showed their Accenture HR Audit and Compliance as-a-Service solution highlighting some of the key benefits of using HCP for such applications. He emphasized on the fact that HCP and SuccessFactors are co-located in the same data centers resulting in optimized security as the data never leaves the DC. (Another would be low latency.)
Further reading: Learn more about the solution in the SAP HANA Marketplace
Apigee
Next, Chet Kapoor, CEO of Apigee was invited on stage to talk about Apigee's mission to power the backbone of digital commerce via enterprise APIs. Personally, this topic has always been one of my favorite usage scenarios for SAP HANA Cloud Platform (see here) and as such I'm happy about this partnership between SAP and Apigee resulting in an API Management product (and more to come). For more information please refer to the following two blogs by joav.bally:
- To New Horizons with SAP API Management
- Uniform Provisioning and Consumption of SAP (and non-SAP) Data
API management will certainly become more and more important going forward, especially also considering the impact of topics like Internet of Things (IoT), which are based on APIs. As such, expect more news on that front in the coming months...
Demo Time
Björn wrapped up the session with a very impressive live coding session, in which Ian Kimball (some of you sure know him moderating DemoJam) and him used SAP HANA Cloud Platform to develop a mobile application from end-to-end. Starting from the API Management solution to identify the proper APIs, they used the SAP Web IDE to develop a mobile app and pushing it as a native iOS application to a company app store. I believe that demoing this whole process live on stage during a keynote speaks volumes about the ease-of-use and stability of the platform!
Outro
With that I wrap up this recap of the two keynotes. If you haven't yet done so, I hope this blog post encourages you to watch the keynotes yourself. Either way, if there's one thing I want you to take away from this post then it's that: SAP HANA Cloud Platform is definitely something you should familiarize yourself with. As said, we offer free developer accounts and free training... Just give it a try - it takes less than 3 minutes to sign up!
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