SAP Mentors @ Developer Kickoff Meeting 2016
Location: SAP Arena Mannheim / Messe Karlsruhe
Date: 14/15 January 2016
A new year, a new beginning.
Reborn, like Jake Sully at the end of Avatar. That's how I've started 2016. It felt good to go to the first SAP Mentor gathering around SAP's annual DKOM (Developer Kick-Off Meeting). In this internal event, we (SAP developers and SAP Mentors) got to hear and see where SAP will place it's focus in 2016. So I would say an ideal event to kick start the new year.
What are SAP Mentors?
For those who are not familiar with the SAP Mentors, we're elected into our role by the SAP Community, by SAP and by other SAP Mentors. We represent the community at large, we voice for other community members, customers & partners and we influence SAP in many different ways and one of those way is meeting up with executives and product teams to provide feedback on where SAP is going, what we've noticed and where things can be improved. SAP keeps us informed on what they are planning and doing and by doing this, we also get more insight so it's the base model for a win-win situation. We're not SAP cheerleaders either so we prefer candidness, while we will try to solve this in doors first within these meetings, if we feel strong a change is needed and SAP isn't listening we take it to the community at large. In past cases, this has helped push the needle on several topics, alongside with other groups who do similar efforts like user groups which are provide a lot of feedback to SAP.
Breakfast and meetings.
The SAP Mentors had a breakfast with a number of executives of SAP. During the day, we had a meeting with Björn Goerke (Executive Vice President and Corporate Officer, SAP Product & Innovation Technology at SAP), Sam Yen (Chief Design Officer, SAP and Managing Director, SAP Silicon Valley) and Tanja Rueckert (Executive VP Internet of Things & Customer Innovation at SAP - IoT, Industrie 4.0, localization, custom dev&innov, HANA).As always valuable discussions which are greatly appreciated by both sides.
Showfloor & sessions
We were on the showfloor, it really felt like TechED on the second day to present ourselves to the developers of SAP. Luckily we had some visits so we're spreading the word about what SAP Mentors are and what we do inside of SAP as well.
Shots by SAP Mentor Frank Köhntopp (or at least his camera when he's in the picture as well)
A couple of sessions by SAP Mentors outside of "Meet he SAP Mentors as well". Tobias Trapp presented to SAP his findings on recent implementations that involve user experience elements of SAP and a bunch of SAP Mentors (Gregor Wolf, Tom Van Doorslaer and Martin Steinberg) teamed up with Thomas Grassl (Global Head of Developer Relations and Marketing at SAP) to have a panel discussion around the future of SAP developers.
We also forged new connections and those will be transformed into virtual meetings with those respective teams first which can then afterwards be translated into physical meet-ups when the opportunity is there.
Shots by SAP Mentor Frank Köhntopp (or at least his camera when he's in the picture as well)
That's all I can share about this right now because content wise, what happens at DKOM stays at DKOM.
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