SAP TechEd 2011 Overview

• September 20, 2011
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The SAP TechEd 2011 conference wrapped up in Las Vegas last week. This is SAP’s biggest conference with over 6500 visitors. Here is a quick overview of the event from our perspective.

SAP TechEd Pre-Conference

Monday evening unofficially started the conference with a guest key note session from Jane McGonigal. She spoke about games and how games can change the world. This led to controversial discussions about the gamification of IT in the audience.

SAP TechEd 2011 Keynotes

Tuesday, Hasso Plattner introduced the executive keynote with a recorded video message. He explained that SAP has started fundamental changes, but at the same time SAP continues to support existing installations.

Vishal Sikka followed with a brief overview on SAP’s strategy – HANA shall improve the performance of SAP applications, Sybase technologies will make them more mobile and Cloud services shall reduce the maintenance costs per client.

SAP Portal News

SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3 has generally been available for more than three months.
Many customers visited sessions and workshops at TechEd to learn more about the new portal release, how to upgrade from their current, or how to customize the look and feel.
As always, we are not sure how reliable the information is that SAP gave us about the future plans, but here is a short summary:

• SAP has announced that all business packages are now compatible with NW7.3.
• SAP wants to keep the portal as the central entry point to all SAP and also non-SAP systems.
• At the end of this year, a mobile enabled framework page shall go into ramp-up as part of NW7.3 Portal SP6, which shall be released in the first half of 2012.
• For the future, SAP plans to release a portal that is designed first for mobile devices, but also runs on desktops.
• In a later stage Sybase HTML containers shall enable even more device specific functionality on mobile devices for the portal.
• HANA shall be used to bring the most popular content to the top in real time to make sure that only the most relevant content is displayed on the small mobile device screen.
• SAP plans private portals in the cloud and hosted on-demand sites.
• Enterprise Workspaces are generally available and approximately 50 customers use it already. However the interest in this platform was very low.
• Open Text and SAP have recently announced a Portal Site Management tool as well as a Portal Content Management tool. The release is planned for end of this year. SAP will sell this solution as an SAP product and also offer support for it. The user interface for the portal has some restrictions in terms of usability that we know from other WebDynpro based applications. Only very few participants listened to the sessions about this solution.

SAP HANA

SAP has announced HANA end of last year. In the mean time this technology is generally available and first customers use it already. With several sessions and a dedicated demo area in the exhibition of the conference, SAP emphasized the strategic role of this new technology. Below there is a short summary of the current status of HANA and what we learned about HANA at TechEd in Las Vegas.

• HANA is an In-Memory Database.
• HANA is currently only available as an addition to an existing classical database infrastructure.
• HANA is currently only available for Business Objects.
• The next platform that will support HANA is BW.
• In the future it is planned to run the whole SAP infrastructure including ERP on HANA instead of a classical Oracle database.
• Today data are dumped into HANA from a classical ERP system and delta updates keep the data synchronized with the original tables.
• HANA was developed by SAP using C++ as a programming language.
• Column based data access allows better use of parallel computing capabilities of modern CPUs which increases the computational performance.
• SAP recommends to use HANA with at least 128GB of RAM memory.
• Certified server hardware is available at five vendors.
• Hardware pricing starts at approximately $100.000 for a normal HANA implementation.
• Additionally, HANA Software can be purchased from SAP.
• SAP recommends to implement HANA with consulting support from SAP.
• HANA can be accessed using an eclipse based development tool.
• HANA supports normal SQL queries and JDBC.
• Use of JDBC is not supported outside of Business Objects.
• Read more about HANA.

And there you have it, a quick run down of what people were talking about at the 2011 SAP TechEd. If you have any comments or would like to add, please feel free to do so below.

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