My Experience on SAP TechEd Bangalore

This being my first SAP TechEd, my experiences are countless and still I’ll try to summarize some of the things I felt.

We had a great keynote by Bernd Leukert who introduced some of the products launched recently by SAP along with some demos. The key announcements are…

• SAP HANA Express Edition
• SAP BW4HANA

SAP HANA Express Edition

For me, SAP HANA Express Edition is the biggest announcement SAP has made this year. Express Edition is a free version of the HANA which can run on your laptop! (Yes, it requires 16GB of RAM which is not available in every laptop, but there is a virtual machine version which can be launched in your own servers free of cost)

So, Is that what makes Express Edition special?

No. But you can use the same database for production is what makes it special. Yes, you read that right, you can run a 32GB HANA database in production for free. SAP is trying make HANA accessible to more people which will make HANA more popular. This is a great deal for a good number of startups whose ideas requires in memory capability.

SAP BW4HANA

SAP BW4HANA is a tailor made Data Warehouse solution for HANA. SAP is trying to make the best of the in-memory capabilities of HANA and launches products which are tailor made for HANA Database. If I’m not wrong, this is just the beginning and we may see more such products in future.

SAP is progressing in many fronts at the same time. We can witness huge improvements on HANA, Enterprise Applications, Cloud Platform, User Experience, IoT.

We came across plenty of Lectures, Workshops & Demos. I would like to share some of the things that stays in my mind.

HANA Cloud-Native Application Development

Developing applications for HANA Platform and HANA Cloud Platform have always been different. SAP has come up with unified application model based on Cloud Foundry which is an open standard for cloud applications. Now you can develop applications on Java or Node.js (which are the only two support technologies currently). There is a lot of stress on microservices based architecture where each service can be scaled up or down independently.

Fiori Elements

Imagine how it would be if the data stored on the system knows where it needs to be displayed in the application and how it should look by itself. You wouldn’t need to write frond end code at all! Fiori Elements just does the same. You add annotations that describes where & how a particular field looks like in ABAP Core Data Services (which is a feature in Netweaver 7.5) and when you run the application Fiori Elements knows how to render the data based on the annotation. People who don’t want to dirty their hands with Javascript will be really happy about this.

S4HANA & Netweaver 7.5

S4HANA is based on Netweaver 7.5 which has tons of improvements to ABAP. And yes ABAP is going to stay! But the ABAPers would be expected to learn new frameworks like BOPF (Business Objects Processing Framework) and new way of doing things in S4HANA. ABAP is loaded with a lot of HANA specific features like ABAP Core Data Services & ABAP Managed Database Procedures (AMDP) which will help offload some of the works to HANA itself.

AppSpace was great initiative at TechEd to make people get their hands dirty on HANA Cloud Platform by doing a set of tutorials. People were provided with points for completing tutorials which they can redeem as goodies. Las Vegas had completed 1800+ tutorials last month on TechEd where Bengaluru has broken it by a huge margin with 4900+ tutorial completions.

There are numerous other things we came across such as SAP Fiori 2.0, CoPilot the Siri like enterprise assistant, SAP Digital Boardroom, Machine Learning by HANA Vora, SAP Lumira, Virtual Online Shopping & a lot more. This shows how much SAP is prepared for the next big wave.