SAP Teched 2013 Amsterdam Keynote

[jeroenvandera]

In the keynote of the Teched we had an van Gogh self portrait on stage. This portrait was there for a reason. The portrait was made up from a lot of little points, the so-called pointillism style. The comparison was then made that these little points were all points of detailed data. From a distance you can oversee the whole picture with a report made up from little detailed facts. But Bernd also mentioned that this kind of technology also needs another way of thinking. As he said “We can climb higher and higher mountains with this technology, but we can’t get to the moon’ as that does ask a different way of thinking than continuing climbing.

This story line was followed up by Helen Arnold. She is responsible for the SAP runs SAP program or ‘drinking your own champaign’. I must say I’ve heard other versions of this saying. But Helen showed impressive numbers. Copa 86% faster, Business scenario’s now realtime, automatic accruals 91% faster, so those are nice numbers to present.

Michael Reh showed us a Design Studio app that worked with 0,5 petabyte of data. Removing filters and running a query across all that data was done in 10 seconds. Fun part was that that was also the whole demo so it was really really fast!

Another test was running ABAP and HANA code side by side on the same machine performing the same task. We saw that ABAP took 28x longer to complete.

SAP fiori was an import part of the keynote. SAP fiori basically puts an visualization layer over the application layer. Together with HANA it should make developing a much simpler task.

Later in the keynote we were shown a couple of sample applications on HANA. What we were also shown was how easy debugging will be. When hovering over the code you could see on the right how the variables were changed in the code and even how the screen was being rendered. By scrolling through the code you could see what is was doing.

At the end we heard some customers telling about how they worked with SAP. But we had to cut short, because the Keynote ran out of time and we had to go to the lectures!

If you want to see the keynote :

http://events.sap.com/teched/en/session/8677