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former_member182129
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October 18th. I just arrived in Las Vegas for what will be my 7th SAP TechEd since joining the SAP Co-Innovation Lab. In 2008. It was in 2008 that we had our Labs in Silicon Valley and Tokyo fully operational and that same year launched our 3rd COIL in Bangalore. It’s been an interesting journey from our beginnings in GEPG/GSTP (Think Global Partner Organization or GPO). Since then we’ve been in multiple organizations within the product organization and now coincide with other partner-focused teams that make up what is known as Partner Lifecycle Services. SAP TechEd is a big deal for COIL- we get to show off some of the work we are doing with partners, connect with other colleagues doing innovation work (think massive tacit knowledge exchange) as well as connect with new and existing partners and/or firms aspiring to partner with SAP to talk about project work that can yield game changing co-innovated solutions.

Regardless of the organizational structure- the COIL mission and charter has remained true since its inception- it enables full spectrum co-innovation project work with SAP ecosystem partners and customers across a broad portfolio of technology topics- cloud, big data, analytics, AI, sustainability, security and Internet of Things.  It’s really extraordinary to see nearly 30 projects in flight in the Silicon Valley COIL this year.  I’m not going to write my typical yearly TechEd blog post where I attempt to highlight the projects still under way or just completed because there a simply too many of them and not enough of me.  From sun up to sun down over the last 9-10 months, I’ve personally been consumed with 3 projects we pursued under our COIL IoT Kickstarter program. Such super multi-dimensional projects and all on are track to become real co-innovated solutions going to market in the Oil & Gas, Mining and Sports Entertainment Industries.

With a background and work experience applicable to the IoT topic, I’ve contributed to the IoT projects more hands on and with respect to project management and I've stayed well connected to a lot of other equally cool projects in flight and under development at COIL this year too. We have our ever active colleagues from SAP NS2 continuing to demonstrate the use of SAP Hana in big data analytics solutions brilliantly leveraging the capabilities of the entire platform.  Much of this work has taken full advantage of the SGI UV300H rack we have running in the COIL but also using a lot hardware from Cisco and Tintri and SS8. We’ve got some emerging new project work with this team that I will indeed devote a dedicated post to by end of year or early 2016.

We’ve got some very cool projects in motion featuring Sybase ASE and Flash storage, we have some exceptionally cool healthcare-based use cases leveraging geospatial with Critigen, some new work on the VDI topic is now forming with Citrix with a Fiori focus and 3 of our projects this year aiming directly on solutions to be delivered from the SAP Hana Cloud Platform. One of these projects, focused upon the Construction Industry is with Element Five Solutions. Before college and during summers in between, I’d often get hired on to construction crews doing road work. When I saw the solution Element Five has built featuring mobile apps that a foreman in the field can use to manage projects and workflows with a few finger swipes across the screen of a mobile device I was pretty blown away.  It wasn’t so long ago that just the basics were managed (barely) using clip boards or what a boss did solely based upon experience. To use an app to know how to crew a job and if  you need to lease heavy assets like cranes or graders where data like weather forecasts gets factored into making informed decisions on the job site is really cool.

We’ve got phase 2 COIL project work forming up around prescriptive maintenance and other IoT focused project work exploring how SAP HCP and Fujitsu TeraSpection can deliver a co-innovated solution to industries like Oil & Gas. I think this has high potential as I can relate it so easily to past work experiences. I once worked in a QC Lab for Tropicana (at that time a subsidiary of Beatrice) and had to hustle around gathering lab samples across a dozen or more points in the production process plus conduct inspections of systems like juice presses, blend rooms, freezing of concentrate, glass bottle formation and even shipping. I cannot imagine how much time I could have saved if I could have used tablet based inspection that let me get information from back end systems in real time or to report newly discovered problems. There is so much to like about companies going all digital and I love working for the company that can truly help other firms to get there- everyone benefits.

We still have some amazing project work going on with the Hana Technical Academy, Cisco and EMC on the SAP HANA HA/DR topic and some new work emerging with Hitachi Data Systems to explore Storage and System replication as it relates to Hana Data Tiering. Other excellent projects in motion with CA and NetApp, some new geospatial-focused work with Pitney Bowes and in the days ahead we should be teeing up a new Hana-based healthcare solution.

We’ve got a lot of very cool, very relevant projects going on this year and I am really proud of the work and the results we are producing. If you are at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas this year, come by the show floor and say hello. I can share a lot more person to person and it saves me from writing a COIL novel on SCN.

I will additionally be giving a brief talk on the IoT topic On Thursday Oct. 22nd in the network lounge on the show floor (EXP27326, Make the Internet of Things Tangible. End to End IoT Solutions with SAP HANA Cloud Platform).  If you are not at TechEd, then give me a chance to get back to the office next week as I do plan to blog a few more times before end of year to draw better attention to so many awesome projects.

Stay Tuned.