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On the first full day of Tech Ed 2013, I had one half keynotes/meetings, one quarter hands-on session, one eighth lecture, and a smattering of hallway networking conversations. An interesting time, for sure. Suffering from a head cold, I missed part of the keynote, but was given the privilege of attending the press conference afterwards with Michael Reh (sporting an SAP Mentors jersey), Abdul Razak (Head of Customer Engagement & Strategic Projects), Bernd Leukert and Vishal Sikka. I'll pass on an easy rant on real-world HANA penetration, and hit on the aspects of "Project Ganges" that struck me.
A google search found an article in The Hindu Business Line, "SAP set to log into kirana stores for new biz avenues" from August of this year, a lightly rehashed press release claiming software implementations would occur in "two months". I'm skeptical. While I'm certainly not an economic expert, my observations of the retail business processes in this country find a lot of bureaucracy, paperwork, and duplication of effort. Small "mom-and-pop" shops would likely find it challenging to convert to automated ways of doing business, and I think there would be much social consternation if large retailers flattened the markets by undercutting and outselling the traditional stores. But I could be way off, and welcome more informed commentary
Agenda
Getting ready for this trip, I got a few sessions booked, but am going day-by-day and hour by hour to see what's important to attend. I ended up taking a screen shot from the agenda builder, putting it on a Dropbox page, and then taking another screenshot of that so that if my network connection went away (which it did, several times), I'd still know where I wanted to be. If I had my work laptop, I'd probably be able to do these in Outlook, but I shaved a few pounds off my travel gear by only bringing an ultrabook (plus an iPad, plus an Android phone). I can't have enough offline copies.
Note taking was also a pain, as both Dropbox and Google Drive had rough edges moving from Android to IOS to Windows, particularly when the wireless went dark (pictures below).
Hands-On Session CD161
The hand-out for the hands-on says it was written by rich.heilman, and if that wasn't enough, thomas.jung hung around to provide extra help for those who asked about "SQL Script Basics and Debugging". For some reason, the room was not completely full, so I had a PC of my own, and was able to get through most of the exercises in about an hour. I'd probably like to know more about "R", as it looks like the kind of rabid open source culture that typically doesn't get far in the enterprises I know about. I'll have to ask Blag, and read some of his blogs that I've seen but not dived into. It probably won't help my day job, unfortunately. I also heard "SAS on HANA" mentioned in the press conference earlier in the day. Reminds me if undergraduate statistics classes (<shudder>).
The only downside I'd say on this session was the focus on "how to use the debugger" instead of "how to debug". I guess that's not a hands-on type of focus.
ITM145 - SAP on AWS
For the lecture session in the afternoon, I flipped a coin between this and "post-copy automation for BW (ITM204)". Both are possibly useful at work, though I think Amazon Web Services is more of the future than many will admit. The lecturer was good (Parijat Mishra), though I would consider about half of the content too basic for a TechEd audience. The more interesting questions about things like latency (India to Singapore, Singapore to the US, India to the US) came up at the end. I gathered Amazon's data center presence is in more high cost areas, with resulting gaps in service coverage.
SCN is 10, etc.
I stopped by a booth where small stickers were being given to SCN members. I think the intent was to recruit new members, or bolster occasional contributors, than to reward old hands like myself. But I had my conference badge emblazoned with the mini-badges Moshe and crew had en masse. My favorite was the crossed wrench and screwdriver ("I was helpful!") because I could swear I heard one of the sticker distributors say "tool-wallah".
I still have the T shirt from an earlier TechEd I intended to give away to someone... Stop me and say hi; it could be yours!
(outside in India - clothing retailer with dot matrix printer and carbon paper forms)
(the ubiquitous paper ledger books in another retail shop)
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SAP Note # 1656099
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