Love your maker - SAP TechEd preview
- Summary:
- SAP TechEd is just around the corner and this year's theme is healthcare. It's a good one for SAP developers to demonstrate they know more than back office ERP.
Next week will be one of the longest in my event calendar. It is SAP TechEd Las Vegas week, an event where developers from around the world gather to both hear and learn the latest from SAP. This will be my eighth year attending this event. I think it will be the most important.
In 2007, I was cajoled by Craig Cmehil into attending a hack night at TechEd Europe in Munich. I'm not a code jock so I was far from convinced that I'd get any value out of it let alone contribute anything meaningful. The clincher? "We have beer." It was a great night and my head still hurts from having been inducted into the pleasures of Jaegermeister, the SAP hacker drink of choice. ;)
Little did I know at the time that I would be introduced to some of the smartest and nicest people I've ever met and whose friendships live on to this day. (You know who you are.) Neither could I have foreseen that wee event turning into something very special and which, to my knowledge, has never been successfully replicated anywhere else.
Cmehil gathered together a handful of his best pals and put them in a room to talk problems and code. The problems I could understand, the code, not so much. But what was clear to me was a passion for making that lives on in the memory.
Over time, that wee meeting has given birth to hack days, InnoJams, DemoJams and encouraged the creation of SAP Inside Track events around the world. I attended one of the first InsideTrack meetings in London and again, the memories of that event live long. Cmehil tells me he has overseen something like 150 xJam events this year alone. WOW!
Why will this year be special?
The InnoJam theme for 2015 is healthcare. From the SAP Community Network blurbs:
SAP InnoJam will focus on solving the needs of the Medical and Health Care industries this year. As the average age of the world increases, medical practices is where critical skills and knowledge that helps millions of people worldwide every day reside; but these resources are limited. Through technology, we hope to improve the efficiency and portability of these skills to the ever growing and increasing human population.
Random people will turn up this weekend and form teams to solve healthcare related problems over 30 hours. They will be fed and watered but I doubt there will be much sleep. The best six teams as judged by a panel of (alleged) experts will get to demo their wares, live in front of all attendees. They will have six minutes in which to get their thing done and they must demonstrate running code - no slideware. These are exciting and harrowing events. I know.
Side note: check out the work Hugh MacLeod has recently done on healthcare.
I've participated in one that was supposed to be a sure fire winner and flopped miserably. That project now languishes in the Apache Attic. It was a hell of a lot of fun while it lasted. It was a reworked Twitter for enterprise that included process workflow before Twitter became the thing it is today. Now we have Slack, Jam and Chatter so I can console myself in the knowledge that we were ahead of our time.
Positioning InnoJam with healthcare is a smart move. SAP needs to show the world that it is much more than a back office ERP. These events provide that showcase. My only concern is that so much of what gets shown never ended up as product. SAP needs to do a far better job incubating those ideas.
But there is much more to come.
We've already seen the leaked story about Orca, a cloud based BI engine that SAP hopes will smash the likes of Tableau. Good luck with that whale. Coincidentally, Tableau also has its user conference in Las Vegas at more or less the same time as TechEd. That isn't the story I am expecting at TechEd. Instead, I am expecting something far more exciting around customer experience, a topic I recently discussed. Along with colleagues though, I want to see tangible evidence that SAP 'gets' cloud delivery. I sense that 2015 is their last chance to communicate that one.
To that end, I am looking forward to Steve Lucas keynote. He knows how to work a crowd. I am looking forward even more to him coming on the video couch that Jon Reed and I will have operating throughout the event. He doesn't get to work me. ;)
But above all, I am looking forward to meeting the many maker friends I have in the SAP world. Why am I so keen on this event when I am a 'suit' who can sort of code after a fashion but very badly? Simple --- I learn so much but more to the point, SAP developers are keen to give away their knowledge in ways I've never seen elsewhere. Perhaps I need to get out more. Regardless, this will be a special event and you can be sure that Jon and I will record a shedload of videos that will include some familiar faces but also some new ones.
Disclosure: SAP is a premier partner at time of writing and will cover most of my travel and expense costs for attending TechEd.