Insomnia @ SAP InnoJam 2011 Netherlands: Part 1 of 3 and Insomnia @ SAP InnoJam 2011 Netherlands: Part 2 of 3 of this blog series described the event and who won the contest. In this final blog post I want to wrap-up the event from my point of view and give you some additional "goodies" like pictures taken during the event and some more videos.
This SAP InnoJam was a really exiting experience for me. On the one side I must say I didn't expect this huge commitment from the participants. Given the experience from the Innovation Weekends (that was the initial name of the SAP InnoJam was called last year) last year, I expected that most of the participants would leave by 11pm and around 1am the last participants would have left.
In the Netherlands I had to give up at around 1:30am, but at that time more than 70% of all participants still worked. At the end we've had a handful of developers hacking through the night. Some of them slept on the ground others slept on a couch in the building. After sleeping for a couple of hours in the hotel I got back at 7:30am and half an hour later we've had nearly everybody back at the event hacking and discussing about the final steps for the presentations. What a commitment!!
During the event I've tried out for the first time to livestream parts of the event. You can watch the recorded video on our Ustream account. As we are still in an evaluation phase you'll see some random advertisement at the beginning of the videos. Once we are sure if we want to pursue this course the ads will go away.
Besides all the positive things we've also had some issues. On the one side we've had issues with the network setup for SAP NetWeaver Gateway. On the other hand we've had some downtimes on River that made it difficult for some of the participants to get their prototypes ready by the deadline. But at the end 4 of the 5 teams presented a working prototype, and in the case of the winning idea even something that could be used right ahead. Awesome, isn't it?
At the end I think this SAP InnoJam at the Netherland's SAP offices in s'Hertogenbosch was a wonderful experience for me. Many participants using all kinds of different SAP and non-SAP technologies to work on business cases that they thought about. All of this in a beautiful SAP building with the VNSG colleagues on-site that organized all the little and big things for this event and together with the SAP colleagues from the Netherlands and those that presented the SAP technologies and gave on-site support to the participants. Highle engaged and motivated people at one spot for 30 hours with a great technology and community experience including a competition. Not sure where else you can get so much in such a short time frame.
I hope the participants enjoyed the event as much as I did as I think THEY REALLY ROCKED!!
Again thanks to all that helped during this event like the VNSG (Mientje Paais, Hans de Labije, Rob van de Marc), Robert Eijpe (VNSG), the presenters of the SAP technologies (Martijn Tielen, Juergen Schmerder, Andre Fischer, Chris Whealy), Mark Raben, Fred Verheul and the many, many other people who worked in the background to make this event am amazing experience.
Hope to see you at one of our next SAP InnoJams.
Best,
Rui
