It was my great pleasure to kick-off the 2014-2015 academic year with a return to Duke University and the Fuqua School of Business September 23rd and 24th . This marks my third season as “branding ambassador” for our top-talent efforts and providing visibility and awareness for SAP at Duke. Click here
for a photo album with some highlights of my visit. A few quick highlights to share:
- SAP Sponsorship of the Fuqua MBA Marketing Conference, including a “hot topic” session I gave “Navigating the “New Normal” – Meeting the Challenges of the Modern Marketer”, supporting the event’s networking lunch and the networking fair after the event. We saw lots of interest in SAP, B2B marketing and the confluence of marketing and technology and our vision for modern marketing. Click here for my slides from the session.
- Duke/Fuqua Faculty Meetings and a New Big Data Course: it was my great pleasure to meet with Professor Carl Mela, who is the Fuqua Marketing department coordinator, to discuss broader opportunities for SAP with Duke around marketing. I also met with professor Alex Belloni, who I spent time with during his sabbatical at MIT earlier this year and gave input on content and contacts for the new Big Data course he was developing. Alex has successfully launched the Big Data and Data Mining class at Fuqua which is off to a great start and two full sections (with a waiting list).
- Duke Basketball, SAP and Big Data Analytics: I met with Fuqua 2nd year Kevin Brilliant, who is the project lead for an effort “going live” soon on Duke Basketball partnering with SAP and NTT Data and built around SAP HANNA and Design Studio. This is tied into our SAP Sports & Entertainment business and is an exciting project with multiple opportunities for further promotion as well as extending and building upon for broader efforts. Kevin lives up to his last name and we discussed a broad range of follow-up and supporting activity.
- Serendipity Prevails: While leaving the school Wednesday evening, I walked by a Sports Business program being run in the school for a local research triangle association. I noticed that Don Waddell, President of the Carolina Hurricanes NHL team, was a speaker. I introduced myself and told him of SAP’s focus of our SAP Sports & Entertainment business, the partnership with the San Jose Sharks, our role in sports analytics efforts, and more. Timing was great as I had just viewed a special on local TV on hockey and analytics!
More to follow -- we're off to another great start for the new year at the Duke University and the Fuqua School of Business.
