When it comes to cloud topics, one cannot resist thinking up punny titles.
All joking aside, if you are hoping to experience all the sessions about cloud technologies, SaaS (software as a service) offerings, and on demand solutions at the upcoming ASUG / SAPPHIRE NOW conference , let me save you some trouble. Its not humanly possible! There's too much for one person to take in.
There are over 85 sessions in this topic area that I've selected, and this does not include the many breakfasts, dinners, networking receptions, and exhibits from SAP Partners. Searching in the "hot topics" filter for "On Demand / Cloud / Virtualization" does a pretty good job, but some relevant sessions are missed, and some are mistagged as "cloud" in the hopes of getting you to attend (aka cloud washing).
This blog covers the following:
- The On Demand Information Concierge at SapphireNow
- My recommended master agenda of cloud/SaaS/On Demand related sessions that you can add directly to your SapphireNow Agenda.
- Quick suggestions how to select from this list
The On Demand Information Concierge at Sapphire Now
Are you looking for advice on what sessions you should select to learn about cloud, virtualization, SaaS, or On Demand solutions? The On Demand Information Concierge is designed precisely for answering that question. Located in the very front of the Sapphire Now show floor, you can't miss this booth. Stop by here first for suggestions about what is relevant for you, and try out some of the hands on demos and devices located here.
Specifically, the On Demand Information Concierge can give you an overview of the cloud strategy at SAP, and give you advice on which ASUG and SAP sessions to add to your agenda for specific topics such as:
- SAP Business ByDesign for small and midsize companies
- SAP Business ByDesign for subsidiaries of large enterprises
- SAP Business ByDesign - opportunities for SAP Partners
- The new Line of Business OnDemand portofolio
- SAP Sales OnDemand
- SAP Sourcing OnDemand
- SAP Travel OnDemand
- SAP StreamWork
- SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand
- Project River
- SAP cloud and virtualization technologies
- SAP Store
- SAP Partner sessions covering cloud and SaaS solutions
This is where I will be spending most of my time at Sapphire Now, so please do stop by and say hello.
Greg's master list of all things cloud, virtualization, SaaS, and OnDemand at SapphireNow
At the end of this blog is my Sapphire Now agenda covering all sessions that I believe are interesting to anyone who wants to know about SaaS, on demand, cloud, and virtualization technology in relation to SAP solutions. I would attend every one of these 85 sessions if I could just clone myself into 3 people.
The SapphireNow team loaded my master agenda into the Agenda Builder, so you can add all the sessions covering cloud, SaaS, and on demand offerings directly into your agenda. Be warned - its a lot of sessions, and you'll have to spend time deciding which sessions you can attend.
If you are giving a session, and you don't see it on this agenda, then either I missed it, or I didn't think its relevant. Drop me a message and I will correct the list if I agree that its an omission.
Some fast suggestions how to select from this list
I recognize that its daunting to parse through 85 sessions and select and prioritize those that are actually relevant to you. This is why we've preselected 3 sample agendas on the ASUG / SAPPHIRE NOW Agenda Builder.
These sample agendas cover 3 popular views:
- SAP Business ByDesign - select this sample agenda if learning about SAP Business ByDesign is your primary purpose for attending SAPPHIRE NOW - especially if you work for a small or medium sized company.
- Cloud - focusing on the technology side of virtualization and hosting. This is suitable for IT enterprise architects.
- On Demand - focusing on SaaS solutions offered by SAP. This is a sampler agenda allowing you to get a breadth of the different offerings.
You can quickly select these from the Sample Agendas tab on the Agenda Builder:
Coming soon: Deep Dive Agendas
Lastly, since I know some of you will want to go deep on a couple of these topics, I am creating smaller subsets of this master agenda. I will describe these in a couple of blogs I will be posting the rest of this week, and I will cross link them here.
Update: we just got the deep dive agendas loaded. They are described in my newest blog, with links so you can easily add them to your personal agenda.
Here is Greg's Master Agenda:
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You may access your agenda at any time by visiting the SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference Agenda. You will be prompted to enter your login information. |
Sunday, May 15, 2011 | ||||||
08:00 AM - 12:00 PM
| ** ADDITIONAL REGISTRATION REQUIRED ** - Achieving Procurement Excellence – Real-World Best Practices
**Additional Registration Required** Half-Day Seminar Sunday, May 15, 2010, 8:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. $295.00 ASUG Member/$395.00 Non-Member This session will feature customer-driven presentations and share examples of successful real-world procurement practices. Guest speakers will detail lessons learned, share best practices and introduce procurement models that audience members can apply to their daily procurement activities. Presentation topics include a supplier management session, a strategic sourcing session, and a SRM session. A procurement executive from SAP will moderate, share recent market research, and provide a procurement roadmap overview. Experience Level: Advanced Presentation Category: Supply Chain Management
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08:00 AM - 05:00 PM | ** ADDITIONAL REGISTRATION REQUIRED ** - Manage and Operate SAP Systems on Virtualized and Cloud Infrastructures – Insight from the Experts
**Additional Registration Required** Full-Day Seminar Sunday, May 15, 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. $495.00 ASUG Member/$595.00 Non-Member SAP customers are looking toward virtualization, cloud technologies and application management tools to increase business agility and reduce costs. To help customers address their challenges, SAP is developing technology, management tools, and value-added services to help customers deploy and manage existing SAP applications in physical landscapes or virtualized infrastructure environments, on private or public clouds. This seminar will provide an overview of the current state of this initiative and provide a look into the future of virtualization and cloud infrastructures. Other focus areas of this workshop include overviews of virtual landscape considerations, implementation concepts, SAP management tools for virtualization, and more. The session also allows time for Q&A and discussions. Experience Level: Advanced Presentation Category: Business Integration, Technology & Infrastructure (BITI)
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Monday, May 16, 2011 | ||||||
09:00 AM - 10:00 AM | Keynote - "The Future of Business - Imagining the World in 2015 and Beyond" presented as a panel discussion by SAP in collaboration with digital knowledge forum Big Think. | |||||
10:30 AM - 11:15 AM
| Autodesk and CSC: Managing Energy and GHG with SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand
Discuss with two companies, Autodesk Inc. and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), how they went live in weeks with the SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand solution. Learn how they are now using the solution to manage and reduce their corporate energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint. Experience Level: Intermediate Hot Topics: Sustainability / Green IT Industry: High Tech & Electronics Focus:Business SAP Content Category:Sustainability
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10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
| Clouding Services: Moving from Staffing to Service Delivery Model
In this presentation, attendees will learn about a new model providing services in the cloud. The model is successful irrespective of who executes the service, where or how. It is completely based on Business SLAs and efficiencies and allows IT to focus on innovation. Our presentation will reference two cases. Experience Level: Advanced Presentation Category: Technology: The Evolving SAP Landscape with Upgrades, SAP NetWeaver, SAP Solution Manager, and Application Lifecycle Management.
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10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
| Making the World Run Better: Sustainability @ SAP
Sustainability is a hot boardroom topic, but many companies find the need for a roadmap or structure on how to get started. See how SAP can help you develop a framework based on a business-case approach, and hear many examples of how other customers are addressing their sustainability opportunities across energy management, product safety, emissions reduction, health & safety, supply chain, and reporting. This session will provide an overall perspective and spell out roadmap expectations, SAP's own experience, and product updates. Experience Level: Intermediate Presentation Category: Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Hot Topics: Business Intelligence and Analytics,On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization,Sustainability / Green IT
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10:30 AM - 11:15 AM
| Running Your Professional Services Company with SAP Business ByDesign
Hear about professional services companies that are running better with SAP Business ByDesign. Discuss building the right pipeline, repeatable project planning, project resourcing, optimizing cash flow, and analyzing and adapting to drive profitability and differentiation. Hear about best practices and technologies to transform your business. Experience Level: Beginner Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Industry: Professional Services Focus:Executive SAP Content Category:SAP Business ByDesign
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10:30 AM - 11:15 AM
| SAP On Demand: Skullcandy Enables Fast Growth with SAP Business ByDesign
Skullcandy designs and sells leading-edge headphones and ear buds. Its explosive global growth has challenged its sales, finance, and operations teams. Mike Hopkins, Skullcandy CTO, will discuss why the company chose cloud-based ERP, the risks and benefits of its strategy, and the business benefits Skullcandy has achieved with SAP software. Experience Level: Intermediate Hot Topics: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Industry: Consumer Products Focus:Business SAP Content Category:SAP Business ByDesign
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11:30 AM - 11:50 AM
| Introduction to SAP's Cloud Strategy and SAP Business ByDesign
Join Peter Lorenz, SAP’s head of on-demand solutions, to discuss market trends related to cloud computing and SAP's strategy. Learn about the rapidly expanding portfolio of on-demand offerings that SAP is releasing and their relationship to the SAP Business ByDesign solution. Hear breaking news about co-innovation with SAP partner Accenture. Experience Level: Beginner Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Focus:Technical SAP Content Category:SAP Business ByDesign
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11:30 AM - 02:00 PM | Lunch | |||||
11:50 AM - 12:10 PM | Discussion: Introduction to SAP's Cloud Strategy and SAP Business ByDesign | |||||
12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
| Building Great SAP Landscapes on the Cloud and Securing the Benefits of Virtualization
Learn how to balance business requirements and resource limitations, plus manage complex global SAP software environments via system virtualization. Understand how new SAP administration tools, technologies, and trends impact your SAP software landscape during P to V (physical server to virtual host) migration. Demystify the new core architecture for system copy, database backup, HA/DR and upgrade options after virtualization. Experience Level: Intermediate Presentation Category: Business Integration, Technology & Infrastructure (BITI) Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization
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12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
| Cloud, Virtualization, and Appliance Deployments: Cutting Through the Hype And Exploiting The Right Model
Go beyond the hype and discover how SAP is approaching systems deployment in physical, virtual, and cloud environments today and in the future. Now is the time to ask: what new solutions are possible as a result of these new deployment models? How can my company leverage them for new capabilities, cost reduction, and more productive employees? Capitalizing on these different models involves understanding today's options and the concepts that will shape the IT deployment of tomorrow. Learn how SAP’s High Performance Analytical Appliance (HANA) is leveraging the appliance model to accelerate and simplify BI deployments. Understand how BI OnDemand and other Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, such as SAP StreamWork, impact your cloud strategy. Come to this session to examine use case scenarios that illustrate the opportunities to apply virtualization, appliance, and cloud concepts in your own organization. Experience Level: Beginner Presentation Category: Business Intelligence (BI) Hot Topics: Business Intelligence and Analytics,On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization
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12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
| Fully Integrated B2B in 90 Days
A competitive factor dealing with Blount’s products is the value added services they supply to their customers. This project’s objective was to give customers a powerful tool enabling them to get their questions answered efficiently and provide an effective way to order product. By providing customers with access to real-time information, Blount has given customers a competitive advantage. This presentation will take you through the decision process, implementation, and outcome of Blount’s B2B project fully integrated to their central instance of SAP software. It will also demonstrate how the use of an on-demand model can give you success at a low cost, in a short time period, as well as how this project is influencing Blount’s strategy for the future. Experience Level: Beginner Presentation Category: Customer Management
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12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
| Networked Solutions Architecture: Current Capabilities and Demo of Compliant Products
Building on more than three decades of delivering integrated Business Solutions on-premise, SAP’s product strategy aims to expand the reach of integration to an Orchestration of entire hybrid IT landscapes (including on-demand, on-premise, and on-device, SAP and non-SAP components). The purpose of such orchestration is to achieve optimal alignment of IT solutions to end-to-end processes, which results in business agility, reduction of IT complexity, and empowerment of users thru collaboration, personalization, and usability. To achieve these ambitious goals, SAP has started to create a common architectural blueprint called "Networked Solutions Architecture" and begun delivering new "Networked Applications" designed according to this architecture. This lecture will give an update on the current capabilities of SAP's Networked Solutions Architecture and showcase several products implementing them. Experience Level: Intermediate Presentation Category: Enterprise Architecture - Emerging Technologies and Roadmaps Hot Topics: Application Lifecycle Management,Business Intelligence and Analytics,Mobility,On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization
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01:00 PM - 01:45 PM
| Arch Chemicals: Managing Energy and GHG with SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand
Discuss with Arch Chemicals Inc., a chemical customer, how it is using the SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand solution to manage and reduce its corporate energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint. Learn how it is achieving this reduction across all GHG scopes. Experience Level: Intermediate Hot Topics: Sustainability / Green IT Industry: Primary Metal & Mining Focus:Business SAP Content Category:Sustainability
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01:00 PM - 01:45 PM
| Business Process Outsourcing Through Software as a Service with SAP HANA
Listen to how our business process outsourcing partners enable an alternative for on-site or on-demand procurement processes with SAP solutions for procurement, based on the SAP In-Memory Appliance software (SAP HANA) use case. Experience Level: Intermediate Hot Topics: In-Memory Computing / HANA Industry: Public Sector Focus:Business
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01:00 PM - 01:20 PM
| King Arthur Flour: Cloud Analytics Delivers Rapid Value Across the Company
Explore the benefits of cloud-based business intelligence. Hear how King Arthur Flour selected, implemented, and rolled out SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand to its 100% employee-owned company rapidly and affordably. Learn how you can spend more time focusing on your business by relying on SAP software to deliver best-in-class on-demand analytics. Experience Level: Beginner Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Industry: Consumer Products,High Tech & Electronics Focus:Business SAP Content Category:Business Intelligence
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01:00 PM - 01:45 PM
| Running Distribution and Manufacturing Companies with SAP Business ByDesign
Discuss how SAP Business ByDesign solution customers are optimizing inventory and supply chain operations, improving cash flow, and gaining better quality of information to improve decision making. Learn how you can address these challenges to deliver customer satisfaction and improve liquidity with a low total cost of ownership. Experience Level: Beginner Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Industry: High Tech & Electronics,Wholesale Focus:Business SAP Content Category:SAP Business ByDesign
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01:00 PM - 01:45 PM
| SAP Virtualization and Cloud Management Technologies
Meet the experts and hear about SAP’s current and upcoming products and services to help you deploy and manage SAP on-premise applications across your technology landscape – including virtualized infrastructure and private and public clouds. Experience Level: Intermediate Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Focus:Technical SAP Content Category:Cloud
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01:00 PM - 01:45 PM
| Social Media Matters to Your Customers
Best-run retailers already leverage social media channels to communicate better with their customers. Now respond to the market or formulate individualized response to the consumer with Pulse Analytics by Mantis Technology Group, which is transforming SAP for Retail solution portfolio clients with a hosted model that can be delivered in one week. Hot Topics: Business Intelligence and Analytics Industry: Retail Focus:Business SAP Content Category:Business Intelligence
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01:20 PM - 01:40 PM | Discussion: King Arthur Flour: Cloud Analytics Delivers Rapid Value Across the Company | |||||
02:00 PM - 02:45 PM
| Jump Into the Cloud Quickly with SAP Business ByDesign Starter Packages
Learn how starter packages for the SAP Business ByDesign solution let you start small and expand safely, rapidly, and affordably. Hear about customers who have implemented starter packages to obtain quick time to value with a proven approach. See how starter packages combine functionality and services by SAP experts to deliver fixed-scope projects. Experience Level: Non-Technical Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Focus:Business SAP Content Category:SAP Business ByDesign
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02:00 PM - 02:30 PM
| Panel: Meet Our SAP Business ByDesign Customers
Join a lively discussion with a panel of customers like yourselves that are live on the SAP Business ByDesign solution. Hear from customers that are fast-growing midsize companies as well as subsidiaries of larger enterprises and how SAP Business ByDesign fits into their business strategy. Bring your own questions. Experience Level: Non-Technical Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Focus:Executive SAP Content Category:SAP Business ByDesign
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02:30 PM - 02:50 PM | Discussion: Panel: Meet Our SAP Business ByDesign Customers | |||||
02:30 PM - 02:50 PM
| Reduce Cost and Increase Agility with Virtualization and Cloud Technologies
SAP customers are looking at virtualization and cloud technologies to help increase business agility and reduce costs. To help customers address this challenge, SAP is developing enabling technology and management tools and services to help deploy and manage existing SAP applications in a virtualized environment, on a private or public cloud. Experience Level: Intermediate Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Focus:Technical SAP Content Category:Cloud
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02:50 PM - 03:10 PM | Discussion: Reduce Cost and Increase Agility with Virtualization and Cloud Technologies | |||||
03:00 PM - 03:45 PM
| How Does SAP Business ByDesign Fit into Your Company’s Cloud Strategy?
Hear from SAP Business ByDesign solution customers about their experiences running on the cloud without the complexities of IT infrastructure. Hear from thought leaders about managing IT as a business service consultancy, how to meet unique requirements with a cloud-based system, and different strategies for rolling out a cloud-based system. Experience Level: Beginner Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Focus:Executive SAP Content Category:SAP Business ByDesign
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03:00 PM - 03:45 PM
| Instant Insight for the Rest of Us: On-Demand Business Intelligence
Explore the benefits of cloud-based analytics with the SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand solution. Learn why companies are selecting SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand to serve mobile workers, partners, and customers and how organizations can reap benefits instantly and affordably. Experience Level: Beginner Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Industry: Consumer Products,High Tech & Electronics Focus:Business SAP Content Category:Business Intelligence
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03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
| LoB On Demand: How to Co-Innovate with Customers in the Cloud World
SAP’s on-demand co-innovation program supports and drives the collaborative definition of new and innovative SAP on-demand solutions and services, such as the SAP Customer Relationship Management application, the SAP ERP Human Capital Management solution, the SAP Sourcing application, the SAP Travel Management application, mobile solutions and SAP solutions for sustainability. The program aims at jointly identifying best business practices with the customer’s line of business to create software solutions that are relevant and practical for their business environment and people. Together, customers and SAP are refining requirements for on-demand solutions and services embedded in a sustainable business management context, achieving business value, and extending the value of their SAP Business Suite software investment. We will present lessons learned from customers, ways to influence SAP’s line of business on-demand portfolio, and future roadmap along their business needs and requirements. Experience Level: Beginner Presentation Category: Enterprise Architecture (EA)
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03:00 PM - 03:45 PM
| The Ultimate Measure of Sales Enablement: Maximizing Revenue by Seller
Sales enablement has emerged as a key business imperative, yet many organizations struggle to understand how to measure its ROI. Discuss best practices for ROI measurement before, during, and after deploying a sales enablement solution such as SAVO Group software, an on-demand application that delivers knowledge to sellers when they need it most. Experience Level: Beginner Hot Topics: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Focus:Business SAP Content Category:Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service
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04:30 PM - 06:00 PM | Keynote - Attend this keynote address to hear ASUG’s vision and strategies to best leverage return on investment from SAP technologies, as ASUG celebrates its 20th anniversary. | |||||
06:00 PM - 07:00 PM | Happy Hour, Exhibitor Showcase including Partner presentations | |||||
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 | ||||||
09:00 AM - 10:30 AM | Keynote - Innovate for 2015 with SAP: Your Preferred Future Starts Now – Solutions that help you meet your need to collaborate, decide, adapt, and operate better. | |||||
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
| Dow Corning Corporation's Integration of SAP OnDemand Product Safety Content Service for Global Product Safety Compliance
This session will focus on how Dow Corning Corporation, a Global Specialty Chemicals company, will reduce costs, reduce risks, and achieve greater efficiencies in global compliance for Safety Data Sheets using SAP EHS content and services offerings and leveraging an SAP EHS Management infrastructure as a hybrid model. SAP’s Expert Content Service offering provides managed services for key product safety and hazardous materials management functions. Key elements of the Expert Content Service are SAP’s deep regulatory domain expertise and IT infrastructure, the combination of which provides customers with a compelling standard of quality and economical benefit. Experience Level: Intermediate Presentation Category: Environmental Health & Safety
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11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
| Getting to Know Your Customer through Social Media
Do you know what people are saying about your company and your products? Did your most recent product release help or hurt your reputation? What is the current sentiment about you on TwitterTM, on a specific blog or in a particular region of the country? If your organization is looking for answers in real-time based on the multitude of social media, product review and competitive content on the web, Pulse Analytics will provide them. Delivered as SaaS, Mantis Pulse Analytics is built on the industry leading SAP Business Objects and Text Analysis solution set. Pulse Analytics delivers key analytics through a set of powerful scorecards and dashboards enabling you to drill into data to truly understand current and historic sentiment towards your company and brands. Learn how other retailers are using this powerful tool to know what their customers are thinking. Experience Level: Beginner Presentation Category: Get Closer to Your Customer Hot Topics: Business Intelligence and Analytics,On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization
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11:00 AM - 11:45 AM
| How Does SAP Business ByDesign Fit into Your Company’s Cloud Strategy?
Hear from SAP Business ByDesign solution customers about their experiences running on the cloud withoutthe complexities of IT infrastructure. Hear from thought leaders about managing IT as a business service consultancy, how to meet unique requirements with a cloud-based system, and different strategies for rolling out a cloud-based system. Experience Level: Beginner Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Focus:Executive SAP Content Category:SAP Business ByDesign
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11:00 AM - 11:20 AM
| Starter Packages: The Fastest Way to SAP Business ByDesign
Learn the basics of the new starter packages for the SAP Business ByDesign solution and how you can get started today. Hear how customers have used them to go live in as little as 10 weeks while maintaining the flexibility to expand and adapt as their business needs change. Experience Level: Non-Technical Hot Topics: On-Demand / Cloud / Virtualization Focus:Business SAP Content Category:SAP Business ByDesign
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11:30 AM - 02:00 PM | ||||||
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