This has been one of the most grueling yet satisfying months
of the NetWeaver saga to date. It feels as if we passed to a new stage of our
campaign, with TechEd 2004 symbolizing the end of our href="http://www.sap.com/company/events/netweavertour.aspx" target="_blank">80 city tour
and our internal DKOM 2004 (Internal Developer Kickoff Meeting) symbolizing the
start of the next year. We have a saying that what you see in DKOM this year
the market sees in TechEd the following year.
TechEd was full of positive energy, with so many developers
engaged in creative projects around NetWeaver. Everyone uses the platform a bit
differently, yet some of the projects have visionary qualities about them that
are hard to beat. I was asked a few days back what was the most visionary thing
anyone is doing with NetWeaver, and I must admit that I am still attached to
the Eclipse Aviation effort.
Eclipse is using the system to connect their design cycle to the FAA, the
airplanes to the spare parts warehouse, and their clients to the available
planes. It is like you watched Dell and Amazon coming together on the same
platform to revolutionize two industries at the same time. I just love to hear
about new projects with their challenges, and decided to ask everyone I meet
with from now on whether I can blog their project
ideas for others to take notes and guidance.
The highlights of our
TechEds this year, I believe, were the Demo Jam
Sessions, which start to shine through the new spirit of SAP: open, partner
friendly, young, innovative and who would have guessed— cool. We have together
created, using SDN as the virtual meeting place, a great community that finally
got together in one physical space. Some of the people who became the core of
this community had to come from other countries and continents, some drove for
8 hours, but all were in best form: sharing and creating, information and
friendship together. It is the sense of shared destiny we all have around this
platform which is less than two years out in the open market. We are the early
adopters, and it will be a foundation for so many enterprises around the world
in a few years, yet we want to keep the excitement that early adopter enjoy in
these formative stages.
For the third time now, Peter Zencke
and I shared the keynote
as the technology platform is getting so close to the application platform that
even the two of us sometimes forget where the boundary lines pass. As the two
layers evolve into a shared platform we will see another wave of changes in the
two industries (Application and Infrastructure), and we started to use the term
coined by JP Morgan “
