Day 2 ( Or rather Day 1, considering Monday was a Pre-conference day ), started off with a sumptuous breakfast and even larger crowds at the Venetian/Palazoo congress center in Las Vegas. By the time I reached the venue, people had already lined up for the Keynote session and most of the convention hall was three-fourth occupied. I managed to make my way around an empty place, and managed to grab a seat.
Multitemperature data was a key concept that I learnt today in SAP HANA, and I thought I should use that in describing/categorizing what I learnt.experienced today.
The Hot
The Executive Keynote by Vishal Sikka
Vishal Sikka took center stage and started off talking about how we find ourselves amidst an era of transformation, and how the TechEd was fundamentally about just the Tech and the Ed to him. Technologies that effect our life are not just the ones that solve our problems but fundamentally improve things. Great technology always empowers the end users and amplifies the reach of people and every industry today is built around such technology. He mentioned how SAP #HANA was one of such technologies that falls into these categories of technologies that empower us. He noted that everyone in the technology industry is building in memory database solutions today and that It is the direction of the future.
He then talked about the power of SAP HANA and how different customers have used them to leverage their business processes and applications. He referred to how DHL runs SAP Operational Process Intelligence in real-time on HANA and what took 7 and a half months to find a signal and cost every day 1.5- 2 millions every day for them, with HANA, analysts found the signal in 14 mins from 80TB of data.
The key flavor to his keynote was Technology that Augments and Amplifies us, and how SAP HANA is kind of like that "eyes at the back of your head" with regards to that and how SAP Fiori is a major refresh from a technology standpoint. Some key takeaways from his key note were
1. Companies are going through transformations every day, and every company needs to look at tasks A,B and C to manage these transitions and transformations.The ABCs are Platform, applications and Purpose.
2. From an SAP Product Evolution standpoint,
- The Fiori UX paradigm cuts across multiple business applications and it is about articulating end user experience into applications. The gateway services now have around 7k deployments.
- Every application/product in SAP is moving to the HANA cloud platform
- All complexities being replaces with HANA as a platform ( Database services, application services, cloud services etc )
Task A - Building the HANA platform - from a momentum, cloud platform and an ecosystem per say.
- HANA SP7 to be available from November
- ABAP stack and HANA stack are brought much closer together and calculations done more in the HANA platform.
- As a real time data platform, HANA supports hadoop integration.
- BW is now a big data solution in HANA SP7 from SAP context, with support of loading and processing petabytes of data.
- A full Web based SAP HANA developer workbench
- Operation Intelligence capabilities integrated into the HANA platform
- Extension platform and packages to build extensions for every application that we currently have in SAP and build it with HANA cloud platform. Eg the successfactors extension
- Openness for developers to extend , renew existing solutions on HANA, cloud and mobile.
- SAP is working in close partnership with Intel to further improve speed and reliability for customer.
- SAS analytical solutions run on HANA and in HANA. The Data Scientist Lifecycle is faster, more flexible and Iterative now with SAS models.
- 1776 core cluster of HANA running on Amazon Web services.
- A new "HANA Infrastructure as a Service" introduced.
More details about the dimensions of new innovations for the SAP HANA platform can be found here .Key comments by Vishal which i felt is very important in this context is
Data without the context of the surrounding process is dead.
Platform is not a platform unless we have an ecosystem of applications built around it
Task B : Re-Inventing All Applications
- Game changing applications being built with the help of the HANA platform
- Business Re-Invented :
- Helping business redefine business processes with possibilities
- Proof of Concept with the Usha company in India improved business processes and speed with HANA, helping them to be more agile and reactive
- Predictive maintenance capability of HANA helps business to be more proactive than reactive
- Simplicity for IT - Real time information must be consumed in real time for actual business benefit
- HTML5 based applications will be built
- Fiori is not just a beautification but a philosophy that results in consumer grade UIs across devices.
- Fiori on Mobile, tablet and Desktop.
- Integrating enterprise search with Fiori with HANA to find business objects within the system , thereby creating a new interaction paradigm.
- SQL Scripting can now be embedded into ABAP code in HANA, thereby making code performance faster
- HANA is for all types of businesses due to a range of platform offerings and applications running on them
- Simpler migration, simpler run, simpler experience with the most comprehensive cloud platform in the industry
Task C : Greater Purpose - Learning, Design thinking and Empowerment
- SAP #Fiori Roadmap – will become the new experience for a consistent experience across all SAP solutions
- Reinventing the edge with learning
- JAM and Ariba networks
The TechEd experience
After the long keynote that bombarded us with all the exciting information, it was time to relax. It was time to visit the clubhouse and I picked up the stickers of the badges i had earned completing SCN missions.I then went around the various exhibitors stalls in trying to get an idea about their products and applications ( and of course to collect the freebies :wink: ) , as well as spend time in the Infozone talking to SAP personnel about the programs, roadmaps and initiatives around the Business Intelligence, Business Objects, HANA and Big data areas. I was pulled over by the media team to do a random Q&A session in front of the camera, and I felt like an instant celebrity for that part :grin:
The Warm
Speaker Networking Sessions
Because of my interest in the Analytics landscape, I limited myself today to attending the speaker networking sessions related to the areas of BI,BO,HANA and Big Data. Some sessions I attended were.
1. How SAP HANA impacts your SAP Netweaver BW architecture
2. SAP Predictive Analysis with or without HANA
3. LSA ++ - BW with no infocubes
4. Getting started with Big Data
5. New CO-PA reporting options using HANA and Embedded BW Virtual Provider
6. Fast and Predictable SAP BusinessObjects BI Implementation using SAP Rapid Deployment
7. Dashboarding with SAP Design Studio and SAP Dashboards
Each of those topics had so much new learning and information about the product, the roadmap, the features and the best practices, that they all deserve a seperate blog post themselves. I am sure you would have already guessed by now that there was no session without the mention of the words "HANA" and "Cloud" in them :smile:
Food
Lunch, snacks and dinner arrangements were really good and provided a good platform for social engagement and interaction.
The Cold
~ The soda cans
~ Unresponsive network in the lounges and halls most of the times
~ Unresponsive people sometimes, afraid to talk to a stranger who walks up to them
The day ended with the celebration of the 10th year of SCN with air cannons and tshirt bullets, and with wonderful demos from at the DemoJam where the teams used SAP HANA in real time in their applications and showcased them. Congratulations to Team HANADeck of Will Powell and Nic Doodson for winning !
Looking forward for all the learning and networking tomorrow !
Snehith
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