Day 2/3 SAP Australian User Group Summit
The highlight of Day 2 was Ray Wang who presented on the “Future of Enterprise Systems”. As a side note he used different analogies of peeing to describe the different social networking sites. That has gone straight into my lectures.
Day 3 started with SAP Mentor Graham Robinson presenting oh how to stay relevant. He used his love of climbing and Antarctica to provide examples. I noticed the audience listening to every word he said and taking notes. One key message; seek out energy creators in life and avoid energy suckers even if you are married to one.
SAP Mentor, Matt Harding, was involved in a panel session with Connie Long (Australand) and Jocelyn Dart (SAP) to discuss “Can you get values out of BPM and what does it mean anyway?”. There were lots of questions from the audience and an interesting discussion. I realised that there is a lot to consider and no silver bullet. Tony de Thomasis (SAP Mentor) conducted a 3 hour workshop on the latest version of solution manager 7.1. This was the first time anybody would have been able to interact with the new version. There is a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPpBNISh6vo
Also Ingo Hilgerfort (SAP Mentor) conducted a 3 hour workshop on the latest BOBJ products. Participants provided great feedback as you would expect.
The SAP Future Logistics Living Lab presented on their activities which included a demonstration of Halodeck. Chris Hemstrom, Linfox, discussed the value of the Living lab to Linfox. There was a lot of interest at the end of the presentation so I expect there will be more companies joining the initiative. The SAP InnoJam top 3 teams presented their prototypes after lunch. The stage was covered in technology including a HANA server. Although there appeared to be a lot of mayhem all prototypes seemed to work.
The last keynote involved a panel of 4 SAP mentors (Paul Hawking, Tony de Thomasis, Nigel James and Graham Robinson) facilitated by the leading analyst Ray Wang. It was all about the key takeaways from the event. Tony was applauded mid-session after he provided a checklist for companies of what to do in preparation for HANA.
The Summit was a great event and nobody could say they did not learn anything.
