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Having never attended a TechED or a Sapphire Now conference previously I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the conference. I’ve tried to stay away from some of the ‘keynote’ messages and focus on the things that I am taking away personally, so in no particular order here we go:

1. Eclipse is coming – with PI development joining BPM, Java WebDynpro, SUP on the Eclipse IDE, and even talk of ABAP development moving to Eclipse, a truly integrated development for SAP is no longer a distant pipedream. This will require some upskilling for those previously focused on PI or ABAP in the native tools provided by SAP, but this move will make cross training across different technologies a lot simpler in the future.

 

2. Project timelines are getting shorter – SAP projects can no longer be measured in months, the rise of mobility and the rapidly changing business landscape has caused a paradigm shift in expectations. This can be seen with SAP now supporting agile development through a ASAP plug in for SCRUM, and the speed at which mobile apps can be developed ably demonstrated by the SAP Trainrace. That is not to say that large scale ERP roll outs can take place overnight, but that real business value can be delivered quickly and effectively with SAP technology.

 

3. SAP BusinessObjects Data Services has come a long way – having a background in SAP integration and data management I could see a lot of potential in the latest version of Data Services on show at TechED. Ranging from the ability to interpret sentiment in unstructured text to providing the data quality engine for SAP BusinessObjects Information Steward. As well as building on its ETL roots as the backbone for ‘big data’ in the Enterprise through the loading of data into SAP HANA solutions (okay I couldn’t quite avoid the ‘H’ word). Data Services can really drive some interesting analytics and provide ‘next generation’ ETL capabilities.

 

4. The Sybase acquisition was not just about mobility and databases – There are a number of other gems in the Sybase portfolio, not least the Complex Event Processing Platform used in a new Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) tool I saw demonstrated with SAP NetWeaver BPM. This was able to be configured on top of existing processes without changing the pre-existing development and potentially has scope to include monitoring of events in other systems and provide real time dashboards of business processes. While this is not due to be released until late 2012 and is no where near a defined product yet (and could well be completely re-architected by the time we see a Ramp-Up product) it was a very interesting concept.

 

5. Cloud Computing – the ‘other’ theme at TechED, with Mobility and SAP HANA ruthlessly hogging the limelight it would be easy to forget this third main theme from TechED. With SAP releasing a number of OnDemand solutions and entirely new cloud based products (SAP Streamworks and SAP Information Interchange), as well as the SAP App Store and ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS) through Edge there is a lot going on in the clouds over Waldorf.