InnoJam
By attending the SAP TechEd in Madrid I had the possibility to attend the SAP InnoJam therr also. As I really enjoyed the InnoJam at ‘s Hertogenbosch I wanted to be there at Madrid, and wow, I really enjoyed this event!
Just a Sunday morning in Madrid, it’s ten o’ clock and at Feria de Madrid there are already over 100 enthusiastics to start with the InnoJam. The theme was "Big cities, live better" and by ways of Design Thinking we got introduced to 5 different business cases.
Technical consultants, who like to code from the start, had to adopt to Design Thinking. Let all possibilities in mind, do not think of solutions from the start and the customer satisfaction is the starting point of developing a product.
After a short introduction into the basics of Design Thinking, we started with strict timeboxes in realizing a product within 30 hours. The different phases of Design Thinking we were led through were Research, Storytelling, Synthesis, Ideation and Prototyping which resulted in the presentation of the prototypes. In the 21 hours left to create the product I got some experience with writing server side java script on Hana and how to create oData services for HANA that can be consumed by SAPUI5, or whatever other component that can handle oData. Although we didn’t finish our product in the way we would have liked to, I really enjoyed the presentations at the end of the InnoJam in which all 8 teams presented their solutions.
It was a great event in which I met a lot of new people and I got really enthusiastic in creating a solution with people you didn’t know before, with new technology and within 30 hours.
SAP is embracing Design Thinking and this InnoJam was a good example of how amazing products can be realised in this way in a very short time period. In the keynote of Vishal Sikka Design Thinking was the central theme.
TechEd
I was a first-timer, I had never visited TechEd before and was really curious to this huge event. Lots of people I know had attended TechEd before and they ensured me it was lots of fun. Therefore I had prepared myself well and had assigned myself a full program of sessions I would like to visit. Not really easy to do when there are over 1700 sessions from which to choose. I had some products I would like to hear from and some knowledge I would like to gather.
SAP Netweaver Cloud If you visited the TechEd you can’t have missed this. SAP Netweaver Cloud is the open source, platform-as-a-service which runs in the cloud on which you can create Java Applications with an HTML5 front-end. You can easily connect with a back-end system as well as there are identity control and document services for SAP Netweaver Cloud. SAP Netweaver Cloud is mainly there to create lightweight extensions on your on-premise systems. Lots of reading and blogs are over here.
SAP Netweaver Gateway The product to connect your on-premise systems to the rest of the world. Gateway is evolving and by introducing the Gateway Services Builder in the ABAP based systems it now really is easy to create gateway services and monitor and debug them. Gateway is based on the oData and atom protocol. Lightweight protocols that can deliver JSON or Atom-feed services. Services on HANA can also be created on these protocols and therefore you use server side java-script. It really is easy to use gateway services and SAP advises to use gateway services for almost every integration scenario with human interaction. A really nice starting point of working with the Gateway Services Builder can be found on SDN.
Process Orchestration PO (SDN community page), is a bundle of three products, Process Integration, SAP Netweaver BPM and Business Rules Management. PO can though be installed with one systemID and has tight integrations between these products. The gain of bundling these different products is in the fact that there now is reliable messaging(XI protocol) between these products. This is a much more reliable protocol than the HTTP/SOAP protocol that you had to use between netweaver BPM and PI. The correlation between messages is improved and can now correlate a million messages per hour. This hopefully will decrease the performance problems of the ccBPM in the abap stack.
Also a clear separation of functionality can be achieved by modelling according to the three layer based modelling as explained by Volker Stiehl in his very interesting session on PO architecture. Volker Stiehl explained is this session that the BRM product is the most underestimated product in the PO bundle. Much more rules should and can be extracted to BRM to make it more easy to configure these rules and extract from the code. BRM is intended to let the business consultant have more contribution to development and configuration of a business process.
Process Orchestration as a bundle is making progress and the use of it will gain in the next years. This is also indicated by the gartner rapport, which states that SAP PO is on the right track and that the scalability and the adoption of HANA will gain an advantage over other platforms.
The 4 days of TechEd showed me where to enhance my skills and where to focus on. Eclipse is getting the tool to gain knowledge in. PO can completely developed from Eclipse and PI as a separate product has also made the step to eclipse. Further skills to develop will be Java (netweaver cloud, PO), javascript(HANA, SAPUI5), HTML5(SAPUI5) and BPMN (PO, PI and HANA).
I didn’t mention HANA too much in my article. The possibilities of HANA are still increasing and the applications/products on HANA are gaining in number fast. Within few years HANA will be commodity instead of revolution. HANA though rises new business cases which in the past were not possible just because of computional power and will lift SAP's products to new levels.
InnoJam and TechEd were lots of fun. I have met lots of interesting people and have gained a lot of knowledge. Now I have to wrap it up and get started with it. I guess this blog is a good start.
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