SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG 2012 Review

• May 18, 2012
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Here’s a quick overview of what you missed if you didn’t make it to the SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG 2012 Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida May 14-16, 2012. While we had a big presentation with the Missouri University of Science and Technology which included a lively Q&A session about SAP Portal statistics and usage analytics, we were certainly able to enjoy the show.

With over 15.000 participants and three solid days packed with Portal sessions, the hottopics at the show included:

• HANA
• Analytics
• Cloud
• Mobility

Other interesting items from the annual conference that we noticed:

• Biggest portal session: Roadmap presentation by Guy Bavly (SAP)
• Smallest portal session: ALL ABOARD: Amtrak’s Journey with SAP’s PBF via Portal (no participants, presenter was not there)
• Average portal session: About 8 participants
• Side note: SAP did not mention the term “Portal” on the Portal booth by some strange marketing reasons, so SAP employees started to distribute orientation maps to all participants of the Portal sessions in order to point them to their booth.

SAP Partner Jump Start

The Partner Jump Start organized by SAP kicked the big event off Sunday before the actual conference got going. Here is what the crew at Sweetlets took away from the day session:

• About 80 attendees in each track
• SAP: More than 40% of SAP’s revenue is generated by partners
• SAP wants to strengthen the partner ecosystem
• SAP wants to evolve from an application vendor to an application and platform vendor
• SAP wants to become the fastest growing database vendor

Tracks for the main conference included:

• SAP SOLUTIONS FOR ANALYTICS (BI)
• SAP SOLUTIONS FOR DATABASE AND TECHNOLOGY
• SAP SOLUTIONS FOR FINANCIAL ANALYTICS (EPM/GRC)
• SAP STRATEGY FOR CLOUD
• SAP STRATEGY FOR MOBILITY

We found the Database Tracking Session particularly interesting:

• 99% of SAP customers have <1TB of data in their ECC
• Visual Intelligence
  • Standalone desktop BI tool
  • Developed from scratch by SAP
  • First available for HANA
  • Later release also for any other data source
  • Contains in-memory database at the client computer
• There will be a HANA value calculator to estimate the benefits of HANA for a customer (see Quantify the Business Value of SAP HANA)
• There is a HANA showcase online with examples of HANA use cases (www.experiencesaphana.com)
• The SAP business suite is now available for Sybase ASE database (Sybase has been bought by SAP in 2010)
• ASE is the preferred database for business objects

Missouri University of Science and Technology presentation with Sweetlets titled “Monitoring Enterprise Portal Usage for Continuous Improvement.”

SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference Take-Aways

Other worthwhile news for main SAP Portal topics at the 3 day show included:

Enterprise Workspaces:

• SAP: It is now possible to access Enterprise Workspaces also on tablets
• SAP: A free 90days trial of Enterprise Workspaces is available

KM:

• SAP: The Portal will still contain KM at least until end of maintenance in 2020

NetWeaver 7.3 SP7:

• SAP: NW 7.3 SP7 allows to upload custom CSS style sheets as an alternative to the theme editor
• SAP: NW 7.3 SP7 contains a framework page that is optimized for mobile phones

NetWeaver 7.3 SP8:

• SAP: In SP8 a framework page for tablets is planned as well
• SAP: SAP plans to integrate the portal on device with Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) and Sybase Afaria in a release later than SP8

SAP On-demand portal (formerly called SAP Neo portal):

• Will be released soon
• Will use a HANA database
• Platform is different to the NW 7.3 portal
• There will be integration capabilities with NW 7.3

SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3:

• SAP: New developments will be released for NW 7.3

And finally, here are a couple of additional video customer references for the SAP NW Portal that we found interesting:

• Procter & Gamble: Customer Testimonial Video

• Vestas: Customer Testimonial Video

Till next year …

 

 

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