28.10.2009

SAP TechEd: Data Analysis on the iPhone

By: Frank Völkel

There’s no denying the trend at this year’s SAP TechEd, SAP’s education and technology conference: An increasing number of applications from the SAP BusinessObjects solution portfolio can be accessed using the iPhone. The Gravity prototype uses Google Wave and combines e-mail and instant messaging. SAP.info reports live from the Austrian capital Vienna.

Jim Hagemann-Snabe, Executive Board SAP (photo: Frank Völkel)

For the third time, the charming city of Vienna is hosting SAP’s education and technology event SAP TechEd. Between October 27 and 29, developers and partners from the world of SAP are meeting to swap ideas, as well as find out about current developments in SAP software. There’s also the chance to watch demos and previews of products that won’t hit the market until 2010 at the earliest.

Big talking points this year are the networking of business processes, the analysis of business data from different sources, and what’s become known as Enterprise 2.0, in other words, integrating the world of processes with the online community.

Mark Yolton, senior vice president of the SAP Community Network at SAP, welcomed visitors to SAP TechEd and spoke about adaptive business processes. He attaches great importance to social networks – which have tripled in size within just one year. In a short review, he mentioned SAP Business Suite software, new applications by SmartOps and Vistex, and SAP’s focus on sustainability.

The keynote was held by member of the SAP Executive Board Jim Hagemann Snabe, who leads the Business Solutions & Technology organization at SAP and celebrated his 44th birthday in Vienna. He gets straight to the point: The days when companies plodded on doing one thing after another – from planning through execution – are gone. To illustrate this, he gave a few examples. It took the radio receiver 38 years to reach 50 million people on earth. The television came next, taking 13 years to reach the same number of people. Within four years, 50 million users had the Internet at their fingertips, and the Facebook community platform took just two years to achieve the same level of pervasiveness. In a nutshell, Snabe stressed that technology is becoming available faster and faster for an ever growing number of users.

Innovation: six weeks, six months, six years

According to Snabe, innovation cycles now come in three different sizes: six weeks, six months, and six years. And companies need stable business processes to be innovative. For stable business processes, companies must have software that can be adapted to future developments years in advance. At this point in his keynote, Snabe quoted a few figures about the market penetration of SAP software: 65% of the world’s chocolate production and 75% of the beer brewed each year across the globe use SAP processes.

But what does the success of technologies depend on? Snabe gave the example of Apple’s iPhone combined with the App Store, which can only be successful with a well structured infrastructure.

Next Page: SAP BusinessObjects on the iPhone

Mark Yolton, head of SCN (photo: Frank Völkel)

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