First day of the SAPinsider BI 2012 conference at MGM Grand in Las Vegas and the location becomes busy in real life and on Twitter. Somebody in the conference team had the great idea to predefine the Twitter hashtags for the conference streams and I am quite ok with #BI2012, but who want’s to use #SAPMOBILE2012 or #SAPCLOUD2012? There should be some space left for the tweet content, right?
Walking through the MGM Casino to the conference center is a strange experience. Not because of all the slot machines, but I am not used to see people smoking in such a public environment any more.
In the conference rooms and floors the atmosphere was very relaxed. You great colleagues and business acquaintances, take coffee and a muffin and review your agenda planning on mobile or paper. Next to the registration booth you get additional stickers to show your interests in ‘Retail’, ‘Web Intelligence’, ‘EIM’, … The product may be called SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards now, but the sticker says ‘Excelsius’ and everybody knows the term. Once you have everything you need you just sit down on the floor and start to discuss.
Steve Lucas and Timo Elliott were first on stage for the keynote ‘How “Big Data” Shapes Business Results’. Upfront to the keynote Steve and Timo had some Twitter chat on the ‘Big Data’ term, which Donald MacCormick instantly used for a blog. That’s real real-time!
Steve promised that the keynote will be completely buzzword compliant and he kept his word – he even used the kitty killing ‘game changer’.
Big Data, Analytics, Cloud, Mobile, Social – not easy to talk about all these topics in one keynote and so we did hear much more about the first three, but that was ok, as the overall message is clear: Don’t think about one piece only when everything is changing super fast. You need a robust framework and then you run BI4 in the Cloud on Sybase IQ, or SuccessFactors with BI on Demand powered by HANA, or …
One thing has not changed in the last 20 years: The data set maybe big, really big, or small – but somebody has to look on it. We believe that SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 has an unmatched capability pared with HANA in-memory database.
And there is one more thing: SAP has now a free consumer App powered by HANA called Recalls Plus in the Apple Store. (Steve highlighted the attributed ‘free’ and ‘consumer’ two times). The next consumer App will be iLike – first available in Asia and then in the rest of the world.
My favorites in this keynote:
- Steve: Not this slide, this is horrible. - Yes, this one.
- Timo: Analytics has changed like photography, it is not about technology to become a better photographer.
- SAP Managed Tags:
