SAP Lumira VIZ JAM 2013 – A door to an ocean of opportunities

[Former Member]

“Lumira” a word that created a world of opportunities for us, from a Viz-Jam to cool blue USB hand bands, from attending Teched 2013 to a lunch invitation with Mr.Michael Reh, SAP Lumira had everything in its stall waiting for us.

As we entered the SAP Labs- Bangalore, hardly any of us knew what Lumira was all about, but the only thing that was in our mind was, we were there to enjoy in SAP campus , which soon turned out to be ‘enjoyment with Lumira in SAP campus’. The first and the most important thing that we learned was the meaning of the word “LUMIRA”, which stood for “ENLIGHTENMENT”. Rightly named, SAP Lumira can effectively enlighten us with the facts hidden deep into our data sets. The Viz-Jam began with a brief introduction and tutorial on SAP Lumira software by SAP volunteers (who later turned out to be the most helpful people around us), and we were ready to hack with Lumira as our weapon.

All students present there for the hackathon, teamed up in groups of three and began with the first and the most important work of choosing the data set. There was a sea of data sets available front of us, and choosing right drop of data set from the sea could play a major part in the outcome of our final presentation. Myself, and my team-mates Maaz and Shreyas realized the importance of this fact and spent nearly 3 hours till noon in search of a suitable data set. The month of December (the current month during hackaton), had a black day in Indian history with Delhi Gang Rape incident creating wide spread protests across the country just a year back. Inspired by the above incident, we had our topic chosen, “Crimes against women”.

Once we had our theme and dataset ready, it was now time to visualize. And this step turned out to be a child’s game, thanks to the easy-to-work SAP Lumira environment and the SAP volunteers who were always there by our side to guide us. With one hour left for the deadline for the submission of our visualizations, we had our presentations ready. But thunder always strikes at the last moment, so was it in our case, when our systems crashed not once but twice and we were left with nothing but just the data sets in front of us. Here once again came the role of SAP volunteers who highly motivated and encouraged us to redo the entire visualization from scratch, and thanks to the simplicity of the software, we did this task in a matter of 15 minutes.

Finally we presented our visualization to the judges who selected us in the top 10, and in the end we were declared the runners up with the students from UVCE bagging the first place, and an all-girls team of Indu, Ketki and Mittal from MSRIT walking away with the third place, with cash prizes awarded to all the three winning teams. Various goodies and branded SAP Lumira bags were also presented to many students as a part of Lumira quiz and the top 10 teams.

Our party didn't stop just at the Viz-Jam event, we were given an invitation to attend the annual technical fest of SAP- “Teched2013”. This was an offer that we could never miss, and the experience of visiting Teched turned out to be the most memorable one. We were exposed to different technologies in offer from SAP and was a very good learning experience. The Demo-Jams and the talks by Sourav Ganguly, Dr.Vishal Sikka were the most memorable ones.

Next offer in stall for us was an invitation for a lunch with the SAP Lumira team and Executive Vice President Mr.Michael Reh, another once in a life time offer. Though we had our exams on the very same day, our college authority was considerate enough in having our exams done at the earliest and letting us to attend the lunch party. The lunch went on with a very good interaction with SAP Lumira team and Mr.Michael Reh who were eager to know our experience working with SAP Lumira and what more we wished to have in the product.

Finally to conclude, it was a week filled with opportunities which began from nothing and ended up with having so many things, which was once nothing. Truly, Lumira enlightened the opportunities that were waiting for us.