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TechEd 2017 – What You Missed

Las Vegas is so much more fun than Orlando — as far as SAP conferences go. (Disney is awesome of course)

Want to meet for a beer to talk through an idea? Walk 50 feet and have 300 bars and restaurants to go to. Need to take a breather from the presentations? Go find your room at take a nap, it’s 5 minutes away. It’s centrally located, has cheap flights, loads of entertainment, great facilities (with cell phone reception), and just … more fun.

This year, instead of a full pass and a booth, I set my focus on using the week to think big, develop, learn from people, and just meet a few passionate thinkers to collaborate with. With that expectation firmly set in my mind, I had a tremendous week.

First, this was an awesome surprise to see Paul Modderman as a hero right at the front of the show. It’s so great to see Paul recognized for this, and also see his new book come out: SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori: The Psychology of UX Design. Go buy it. Now!

TechEd 2017

The Keynote

Last year at Tech Ed, Björn Goerke, CTO at SAP, gave a pretty impressive entrance:

TechEd 2017

This year, he took the future concept a little further and after a pretty impressive video, did the entire keynote in Star Trek character:

Other characters got into the action as well announcing a few new things (mentioned below). I couldn’t tell exactly who each person really was, as their costumes were really well done!

SAP CloudPlatform will run on Google Cloud Platform — that’s awesome. (Anyone know pricing!?)

Google Cloud + SAP

SAP Data Hub — some pretty cool orchestration capabilities which were demonstrated via FitBit, Spark, etc. I’ll have to dig into this more to see what’s ready for the masses.

SAP Data Hub

 

And a nice pic — demonstrating this wildly different architecture than most customers have today (I sure like seeing Fiori on top).

SAP Cloud on Other ... Clouds TechEd 2017

Also — Github integration with abap + git. Oh continuous integration — becoming a reality!?

More containerization with Kubernetes, and a few other things.

There was also a demo on Mendix integration, which is not very appealing for me. (all of these code auto-generation concepts seem to destroy any possibility of a great UX).

My biggest takeaway is the incredible emphasis on SAP Cloud Platform and next generation development tools. Talking to developers about this all week, most are a bit apprehensive of the journey ahead to not only continue developing ABAP, HANA, and Fiori, but now also a dozen other new skills they now must develop. Developers like to code and learn of course, but there is a lot to digest.

After the conference of course — I had some amazing sushi with the Apple and SAP Mobile teams (those guys are a lot of fun!) at Yellowtail in the Bellagio.

TechEd 2017

Peter Spielvogel and the UX Fiori and Screen Personas team also had a nice presentation, and hosted a very filling dinner at Fogo De Chão. It was great to catch up Sam Yen, some of our great customers, and rest of the UX team!

Personas

One other random note — anyone who takes the aisle seat on an airplane flying in or out of Las Vegas is nuts. Some of the most beautiful views in the world are here:

Regarding my other notes, I got to catch up for a bit with my friend SAP Mentor James Wood, who always has brilliant ideas. I managed to build some new machine learning code into our iOS app MeTime.AI (machine learning timesheet entry).

And got to spend time with a lot of other great folks like newly elected and old friend SAP Mentor Diego Dora and countless other brilliant people like Naveen Rokkam.

Last note — that taco party at Gilley’s is really lame. I think they should rent out a show at Blue Man Group or Cirque De Soleil .

In any case, I can’t wait to come back next year!

 

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