SAP TechEd 2010 Berlin Badge

It’s that time of year…

The German summer was sort of a let-down (again) and fall has silenty taken its place. It’s mid of October and as such it’s about time to write the annual wrap-up about what’s been hot and not at this year’s SAP TechEd. For a pleasant change (or is my memory playing tricks on me on this one) this time around Berlin was the first location to host THE event for the more technical-oriented people within the SAP Community. (Maybe we should rotate them from now on?)

As stated in my last TechEd related blog, I missed out in 2009 so in affect I was really excited to be able to go this year (special thanks to my management for their support!) The outlook was indeed promising. Not only was I allowed to go; even better – as my own session was scheduled to be held in both Europe and US – I actually get to go to the oversea event as well! Double the excitement! :)

I spare you another repetition of my usual sales pitch about why you should go (I did that in my pre-conference post already!) The opportunity to spread your network by getting to know more people face-to-face is key. And besides all the progress we experience with 21st century communication technologies; it’s still an entirely different ball game to have chilled with a person in real life. That’s a game changer…. so, yeah I am up for a real treat!

Pre-conference Twitter

I admit that I’ve been a late bloomer in regards to Twitter. As so many others I did not see the value at first – what could be interesting about stoopid short messages about what one is doing. These days I’m trying to spread the word about why social media and especially Twitter is a great way to communicate across regions, cultures and corporate levels! It’s never been easier to reach out and connect… so, a lot of the mix and mingle, speed-dating and ice-breaking started way before the event via social media. And that is very positive indeed, especially as in Europe people tend to be less outgoing (in general.) So, in a way yes, it felt like homecoming. I even heard people refering to it as a family reunion. I can relate to that…

At this point I may should explicitly mention the Pathable solution again, which was introduced this year. It’s been a a well-received innovation and as I’m sure it does not stop there either, I feel we are indeed well on track. (= happy to see SAP embracing social media more and more!)

Now, while I thought that combination would be almost impossible to top at all. It got even betterrrrr…I actually get to go as one of the new SAP Mentors. :o I mean, that sounds way too good to be true, right?  So, well… you won’t hear me complaining this days! #lifeisgood. SAP TechEd Berlin 2010

So, yes… I know I’m priviledged to having this opportunity obligation (we learned this from tribes, right?) – I am fully aware of it. Especially when others do not even get to go at all, usually for the wrong reasons (budget). In terms of sustainable employee and peer relationships I’m positive that it always pays off to send people to TechEd. Thorsten Franz wrote an excellent blog about ways to convince your boss to let you go.

Internally at SAP it’s a different story though. Where’s the value of sending our own people in bigger numbers to TechEd? A dozen reasons come to mind immediately, but I have to keep that for another blog (especially if I want to get this one out before Las Vegas!) So, the minimum to give back is sharing what I experienced and learned, what I heard about… it’s still second best to those who missed out, yet may help to raise the awareness of the value and all the opportunities there are. #mission_statement

High expectations

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From what I’ve heard and been told I’ve not been the only one that made her/his way to Berlin with high expectations. And who blames us… beside personal networking and educational expectations SAP has been chiming that chord via big announcements prior to the event. Of course, the community/ecosystem was eager to finally see some of the marketing become reality. (A lot) more on this later-on.

Getting to the point – so did the event do justice to all these high expectations? A clear YES from my side! Compared to the past ones it was both completely different AND totally frickin’ amazing at the same time. But easy, we’ll cover the keynote who set the theme in a minute, it may be best to go sequentially… and it all started with a big bang, which was NOT the keynote, but… Innovation Weekend.

Innovation Weekend

The Community Days have always been my favorite part of the TechEd experience. The concept of Innovation Weekend had me sold for good when Marilyn Pratt shared it with me (thanks soo much for your confidence and support!) So we were all about to have not one day of clicking and hanging with the community, but two… again – double the excitement!

So on sunday, a great bunch of new and known faces gathered to draft out and develop prototypes for non-profit organizations (NGOs) using the newest technologies of SAP and its partners; being the first getting ours hands on the 7.3 release and a whole lot more of innovative tools (here‘s the link to the complete list). “A friend of a friend is a friend!” was how the ones I spend the 30h with felt like. Great teams were formed on-site and then worked together on their business case of choice.

Personally I must say I’ve been a little disappointed about the result (or lack of) of my team (bc6), which was mainly caused by our struggle with the OAuth protocol required to connect to StreamWork. Instead of a rant though I’d want to document our findings to have at least produced something useful and of value (#backlog). On the other hand, no doubt about it … we aced the collaboration aspect of it and we had a great time working together. I’m sure all of us will die trying to do it again next year, right? :)

[I mean, given the date that Innovation Weekend was kicked-off: the 10th of October - 10-10-10 - it's no surprise it's been a great success. Could there be any geekier date?]

The keynote

Being the more technical focused one among the annual SAP events it made sense to have SAP’s CTO Vishal Sikka speak at the keynote, who started his presentation with the words: “I won’t say ‘I’m a Berliner!’, because a Berliner is a donut and I’m not a donut!” – he had the pople LOLing at the very start. #imnotadonut

While I heard some people say that his presence at stage is not as captivating as Jim’s or Bill’s, I had no issues at all and in fact, I enjoyed the technical depth of the keynote. (#howitshouldbe) I was also thrilled to see Björn Görke on stage at primetime as very interesting stuff is happing in his LoB at the moment. Visually it was quite appealing  to me… simple, minimalistic slides… pictures of nature… Vishal introduced the “Era of AND” evolving around three main topics: in-memory, cloud and mobility.

Here’s a few recommended links to related blogs/media:

DemoJam (aka ‘The American Idol for Geeks’)

For the veterans DemoJam is an integral and important part. I mean, for geeks and nerds alike, there’s little that can top hanging out with our kinds and watch our peers show something cool on stage. Still, as Craig Cmehil pointed out there’s way too many submissions from SAP internally… or should I say too few submissions from the partners and customers?!? Are we doing a bad job at promoting the event? I mean, there have been some amazing success stories resulting out of this. Winning DemoJam can get you kick-started, so… what’s the reason for it? Is it simply that the economy has taken its toll and have people overloaded and not being able to put in even more late-night sessions?

So how was it? This year’s demos were alright, nothing that had the crowd on the edge of their seats though. All teams showed interesting stuff and it was entertaining to watch, so we had a good time. Personally I think it get’s harder every year, as innovation is so fast paced that you can rarely awe people anymore with stuff like mobile or the like. In fact, I think we have now reached a point, where you’re chances of winning are higher if you go w/o an iPhone or iPad.

Session Reviews

OK… so here it goes – I have not attended a whole lot of lectures or even hands-on this year, to say the least! :o

It’s just that this time around there was soo much other stuff going one that I had to make though decisions on where to go when. Being an SAP employee I applied the rational that I would be able to get access to most of the content (slides, screen-cams, demos, exercises,  etc.) after TechEd as well by reaching out to my colleagues, so I tried to focus on the more unique and rare opportunities, which there were plenty of…

Mark Finnern did indeed excel with the agenda he compiled for the SAP Mentors. Lots of Q&A sessions and round table meetings with executives from all kind of areas such as SCN, innovation, sustainability and many more. So, that’s where I spend some of my time. I met with a lot of colleagues to discuss internals (#evilplans) and I had soo many great and interesting one-on-ones with partners and customers that time’s just been flying by. So, that’s what I meant with “different AND totally frickin’ amazing” at the beginning.

So, let me recap on my own sessions. On Wednesday I had the privilege to co-host PMC360 with Volker Stiehl and Daniel Künstel about “Architecture Guidelines for Composite Applications in Practice: Loose Coupling with Events”. The session was well-received and as always Volker did an awesome job in his presentation (guess that’s the reason why they’ve chosen to use a picture of him in this year’s TechEd promotion material for lecture and hands-on sessions!) The session was timed very well and almost all of the participants managed to finish the scripted demo on time. For all those who did not manage to do that, or want to do it again or couldn’t attend for whatever reasons – there’s good news. PMC360 will be one of six sessions available via Virtual Teched.

And then there was my own session on Thursday morning about best practices and advanced Composition patterns for building Composite Applications using SAP NetWeaver CE. Given the time of the session (8:45 at the day after the party!) I was very happy with the number of people interested in the topic that much, that they showed up so early. I was quite happy with how it went and the demo gods were with me :) (Well, there was a short moment of shock, when after the demo I wasn’t able to get out of the remote desktop connection to my cloud instance, but oh well…)

SAP TechEd live interviewOn Thursday afternoon, Volker and me were giving a SAP TechEd live interview about the topic of “Sustainable Architectures for SOA”. In principal we talk about why the architecture principles of SOA are still relevant for enterprises even with all the hype about RESTful services we see at the moment. I’m about to elaborate on the topic some more in an upcoming blog…

Everything else

What else is there worth mentioning? Two things come to my mind immediately: WIFI and food. Both were excellent! The WIFI was just there… very reliable and instantly. Given the ever increasing number of WIFI-enabled devices such as tablets and smartphones that is really an achievement. I take my hat off! Same is true for the catering. While personally I’ve been living on sandwiches most of the week, which was mainly contributed due to my super-busy schedule, the quality and amount of food really set a whole new level for such type of events. (Especially the strawberry cheesecake was one of my favorites!)

SCNotties… (save the best for last). The SCNotties have been hosted by Jim Spath again this year and it’s just very refreshing to see the SCN community goof-of and make each other LOL by producing this type of videos. Here’s the blog announcing this year’s winners :)

Last words

Pooh, I guess that’s as complete as it gets. Matter of fact I’m finishing this blog post of from Innovation Weekend in Las Vegas. :) So, I guess I have to write another recap and comparison post in just a few days from now. See you around…

For those of you interested to hear more about the event, I can recommend the following podcasts:

PS:

If you’re interested in having a look at some of the pictures taken at SAP TechEd Berlin – here‘s a collection of links to picture albums on the SDN WIKI. Please feel free to add ;)

Furthermore, in the meanwhile a lot more people blogged about their very own experiences at the event. Hence, I’d like to interlink some of the blog posts from my personal buddy list in addition to the complete blog roll about SAP Teched: