Yes. No kidding. This is the night scene of SharePoint Conference (SPC14) - Microsoft's largest enterprise customer conference of the year happened this week in Las Vegas. It was a long 5-day journey, started on last Sunday night March 2 and ended on March 6 Thursday afternoon. Three of the nights we stood on the showfloor until 8:15 PM. The great thing - we talked to many of our joint SAP and Microsoft customers and partners, learned their demand and validated our current and future product direction!
The conference attracted more than 10,000 customer and partner attendees from 85 countries. At the last day of departure it turned Las Vegas airport into a real international terminal with people holding different colors of passport flocking into the custom.
Throughout the exciting 5 days, there are 3 typical questions I got talking to our booth and session attendees.
1. We have SAP and Microsoft SharePoint and Office, tell me how to integrate them!
2. Tell me what is Gateway PAM, I just heard about it from the session.
3. What is the future planning for Duet Enterprise and SAP and Microsoft interoperatability?
This is no surprising. The demand is high for integrating SAP to Microsoft. SAP has more than 251,000 customers in 188 countries and Microsoft... No need to mention about it. Enabling business end users to use SAP data in their SharePoint, Office and other Microsoft productivity applications is certainly a big business!
To answer that demand, SAP and Microsoft jointly presented SAP Gateway productivity accelerator for Microsoft (GWPAM) and how it compliments the existing Duet Enterprise offering at SPC2999. With GWPAM, customers can now easily integrate Microsoft Office - Excel, Outlook, and any Visual C# based Microsoft applications to SAP. Besides that, executives from the two companies introduced connectivity between Microsoft Power BI and SAP BusinessObjects BI. The side by side offering in Microsoft environment - real-time SAP business transaction updates with GWPAM and powerful SAP BI analytic information triggered a strong echo and spontaneous applause in the 75 minutes joint session.
Looking into the future, SAP and Microsoft development teams demonstrated a lab preview in SPC309. It was amazing to see the instantaneous update of SAP data from Office365, immediate sync of SAP data to Microsoft Azure and adding of real-time image captured from presenter's Windows Phone to SharePoint on-line catalog. All these are linked together and powered by the future thinking of GWPAM!
This week in Vegas, SAP and Microsoft are celebrating their 20 years of partnership. And to our customers and partners, the power are more than doubled when you bring SAP and Microsoft closer together!
Vegas is behind, and we welcome you to looking ahead into the future with us! To find out more info about GWPAM and SPC14, please visit and follow our social media site.
