Yesterday, March 14th. I attended the SAP Run Better Forum here in Montreal. Was a really nice event, with a lot of people a good contents. Let's see a summary of what happened...but before...I must gave some special thanks to my friends and colleagues Krista Elkin, Haig Ehramdjian and Liz Fitzgibbons.
I arrived around 7:10 am, because it's always good to be early.
My morning started with the HP Breakfast Session with Steve Shaw, Chief Technologist, HP Canada.
He talk about the newest HP servers and how they work together with SAP HANA to provide the best performance in the market. Everything is about Speed, Flexibility and Scalability.
Then, Danny Ortchanian, Vice President, Estern Region, SAP Canada presented the keynote speakers Mark Aboud, Managing Director, SAP Canada and Dominic Ore, Vice President, Information Technology, Cascades Inc.
The talked about the SAP's five marketing categories: Applications, Analytics, Database & Technology, Mobility and Cloud. And how SAP helped Cascades to improve their informatic processes.
At the end of the keynote, Steve Holder, Director, Business Analytics and Innovation gave a nice and pretty fun presentation about "Big Data" and all the sources of information that we are attacked with.
At 10:15 am we had the Breakout Sessions which were divided in Business Leadership, Leadership in Analytics and Leadership in Mobility.
My first session was "This App's for you: Mobilizing Your Line of Business with SAP and Partner Mobile Apps" with Sami Toubal-Seghir, Solutions Consultant, SAP Canada. Which was based on SUP and Afaria and the apps that SAP provide to simplify some long processes like Travel expenses, Timesheet and even Employees Lookup.
After this, I moved to "Delivering Enterprise Leadership Through Real-time Insights: Leadership in Analytics" with Patrick Mousseau, Vice President, Value Engineering, SAP America. Where he talked about the importance of analyze the data in order to make better decisions and how SAP products can help enterprises to achieve that goal.
Then, I moved to "Supercharged BI from SAP" with Bradley Harris, BI Center of Excellence, SAP Canada. Where he talked about Business Object Business Intelligence and how to manage big data.
The last session after the lunch was "SAP - The Database Company" with Terry Orsborn, Sr. Group Manager, Product Marketing, Sybase, an SAP Company. She talk about the different kind of Databases provided by Sybase like the very sucessful Sybase ASE along with others. She also presented a video where a customer called "El Machetazo" migrate their Database from MaxDB to ASE pretty quickly and without any problems.
The lunch was good...but too much Montrealer for my taste :razz: Being from Peru, I'm used to tons and tons of food...but I guess this lunch was better for my health :cool:
The last session was "Leadership in Retail" with Steve Kadolph, Industry Principal, Retail, SAP and Jon Wurfl, Retail CRM Solution Principal, SAP America. It was a really nice session, as these gentelmen are not only very aware of their business, but also shared a big sense of humor.
The also talked about SAP Planning for Retail, which really looked nice...specially for someone like me, with absolutely no experience in retail...other than buy stuff...
My closing thoughts are...I can't really wait for the next SAP event! I love them when I was a consultant and I love them even more now :lol:
