Fellow SAP Mentor Paul Kurchina made may day when he send me an email with the subject line: You will like this.

How right he was, pointing me to an ASUG press release announcing that Seth Godin is going to keynote the ASUG Annual Conference happening next week. An event which is co-located with SAPPHIRE NOW. Never have I been looking forward to an ASUG keynote as much as this one.

If you have ever been introduced to the SAP Mentor initiative, you know why.

Years ago Craig Cmehil and I realized what a difference it would make to create an initiative around your most passionate community influencers and how that would be beneficial for everyone involved. It is fulfilling the promise of Enterprise 2.0 of creating tighter bonds, greater engagement and shorter feedback loops within a company's ecosystem of customers, partners and individual consultants.

We created the SAP Mentor initiative. At the beginning it was hard to make people understand its potential. There was a lot of uncertainty and fear of the new that we needed to overcome. Then Seth Godin came out with his book Tribes with the Money Quote on page 30: Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe.

Seth is just an amazing communicator. With that quote, he hit the essence of what we were working on, what we are achieving with the SAP Mentors. It clicked, with SAP Mentors we are assembling SAP's tribe.

People understand it or at least it piqued their interest and they pay close attention.
This is why for years I start off my SAP Mentor introduction slide deck with Seth's quote:

          Sap Mentor Initiative Introduction by Mark Finnern

Link to SAP Mentor Introduction Slide Deck.

With the help of the SAP Mentors we have updated that slide deck just today. With 20K+ it is the most viewed official SAP deck on Slideshare.

I always wanted to ping Seth and tell him what amazing things happen when a company fully embraces his Tribe concept. Well, we started before his book came out, but it just confirmed that we are on the right track and that gave us the extra boost of confidence,

Have I piqued your interest too? More details you can find at SAP Mentors' main page http://sapmentors.sap.com

Over the years we have also collected a couple of stories where SAP Mentors are making a difference in the SAP Ecosystem: Kick-Starting a Virtuous Circle in Field Sales;Tales of Two Inside Tracks, SAP Mentor-Style; All for One and HANA for All; Advocating for Excellence; Tree of Talent; The Inside Track on Community Engagement; Trust + Results = Success

I am convinced that at a moment other enterprises realize the power of such an engagement and will start to develop tribes for their organizations too.

Seth is amazing at crystallizing trends and making them accessible to us, that is why I can't wait to hear him talk on Tuesday later afternoon as part of the ASUG Annual Conference keynote. Find me at the front of the stage proudly wearing my SAP Mentor shirt with the number 88 :-)

Are these new SAP mentors really inspriing? Check out for yourself.

Join one or both of these public SAP Mentor webinars where they will introduce themselves and share something from their expertise with us.

First one is this Thursday 2nd of May 9am PST and the second one is 4pm PST on Monday 6th of May.

Link to SAP Connect Session:https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/sapmm +1-866-312-7353,,3782244518 Participant Passcode:  378 224 4518

Ronald Konijnenburg took the above screen shot from his iPhone during our first internal welcome calls. He was participating at 1am from his Florida vacation and at the end commented, that it worked surprisingly well.

I am still amazed, that we are able to connect with people in this case: Florida, California, Netherlands, Australia and Singapore and have a great conversation.

A couple of years back, it was like pulling teeth to get anyone on camera. These days everyone has it built into their laptop and are sometimes astonished that it works.

You can check it out too this Thursday at 9am PST  and or on Monday at 4pm PST.

Really looking forward to what expertise the new SAP Mentors will share.

If you can't, we will record it and share it with you here. 

Link to SAP Connect Session: https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/sapmm +1-866-312-7353,,3782244518 Participant Passcode:  378 224 4518

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Russia, Moscow                +7 495 213 17 63               

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Singapore            +65 6654 9828   

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Slovakia, Bratislava          +421 2 3300 2610             

Slovakia                0800 001 825      

Slovenia, Ljubljana          +386 1 888 8261

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South Africa,Johannesberg         +27 11 019 7009

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South Korea, Seoul         +82 2 3483 1901

South Korea       007 986 517 503

Spain, Barcelona               +34 93 800 0782

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Sweden, Stockholm        +46 8 5033 6514

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Switzerland, Geneva      +41 22 592 7995

Switzerland, Zurich          +41 43 456 9248

Switzerland        0800 740 352      

Taiwan, Taipei   +886 2 2656 7307             

Taiwan  00 806 651 935  

Thailand               001 800 658 151

Turkey  00800 448 825 462           

UAE       8000 444 1726   

UK, Belfast          +44 28 9595 0013             

UK, Edinburgh   +44 13 1460 1125             

UK, London        +44 20 3364 5639             

UK, Reading       +44 11 8990 3053             

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Venezuela          0 800 100 8510  

Vietnam               120 651 66          

... and Richard Duffy a genius.

You sometimes here the pronouncement from our executives, that this is a new SAP, more agile, responsive and delighting our customers and I often cringe when I hear it, being from the school of don't pronounce it, live it.

Well, check out what the folks around SAP Business One are doing.

Yesterday the SAP Mentors had a public webinar organized by Tim Guest with Richard Duffy around the latest features of SAP Business One.

Check out the replay of that interesting session. 

In it Richard told us that because of lean/agile development methodology the SAP Business One team are able to deliver 30% more functionality than originally planned. In my 25 years of being in the software business I have never heard of something like that. He also shared that they are in Ramp Up with the latest release right now, the one he introduced in the webinar. Some hand selected customers are running it already. There is a certain threshold of open bugs that you need to be below for an SAP product to go to general availability. Apparently they never even had enough open bugs to cross that threshold. They could go out of Ramp Up now, but because of promises to keep it open for a certain number of weeks, they are continuing with the Ramp Up. .

Richard has also created a Khan Accademy style SAP Business One Academy where he is adding about 2-3 videos on how to not only use B1, but also how to become an SAP Business One partner. He also covers in his videos how to be successful as a B1 partner. He has invited everyone to add their own videos too. If I wanted to make a name for myself in the B1 world, I would be all over that opportunity. This is the education of the future right here.

He came into the mentor webinar yesterday with a set of slides and said, you don't need to write anything down, I shared the slides on SlideShare and I taped me presenting and posted it on YouTube already. Richard is on top of things.

He also shared that about 20-30% of the improvements in B1 came in through SAP's Idea Place, and they are just getting started.

Years ago my friend and former colleague Peter Ebert had the idea to have a jump off point to something like Idea Place from every screen of an SAP system. Your moment of inspiration comes when you are working with the system and it would be cool to capture these ideas on the spot. The likelihood for the idea to be posted is so much higher if the Idea Place is only a click away. I wondered whether that has been implemented already in B1. Not yet, but people on the call liked the idea, so I posted it in the Idea Place, while still in the webinar.

To my delight it got 4 up votes and a couple of comments right away. The power of the Idea Place at work.

But then the real magic happened. Richard forwarded the idea to the lead Business One development manager and he agreed that it is a good improvement and will be in one of the next releases, which Richard reported/commented back. SAP is not promising when, as we don't like to be sued for promises made, but judging by the current pace of development I am fairly confident it will be soon.

Richard didn't stop here. Business One is easily expandable, which makes it so powerful in the market. With not a lot of effort you can add a field to a drop down menu on every screen of B1 that links to the B1 Area of Idea Place.

Richard created a little video showing how to do exactly that. More or less an elegant hack for the time until the functionality will be in the standard.

In summary:

• SAP Business One's latest release is coming out with more features than originally promised
• It is so stable that it could go out of Ramp-Up already
• 20-30% of their enhancements came through Idea-Place suggestions
• A feature enhancement went from suggestion to being on the roadmap within 24 hours
• A video that shows an elegant hack on how you can add that functionality to your current B1 system has been posted to the SAP Business One Academy for everyone to implement too.

I am floored. This is the new agile,responsive, customer delighting SAP in action.

With a hat tip to William Gipson: The new SAP is here, it is just not yet evenly distributed.

Thank you Richard Duffy for showing us the way.

Update: the answer to the question of life the universe and #DTMC further down.

It's the time of the year again end of January and the love fest called Community Manager Appreciation Day cmad is just around the corner.

Late last night I taped a tongue in cheek video making the case how to truly celebrate a community manager and why our hash tag should be dtmc instead of cmad.

YouTube played a little trick on me and stopped recording the audio once I started to sing and play the Ukulele. Are they trying to tell me something?

Frank Koehntopp It's the new DSDS quality filter 6 hours ago · Unlike · 1

On Facebook Frank Koehntopp concluded that it is a new quality filter ;-)

I have a super busy day with internal SAP Mentor webinar, SAP HANA Startup Forum, ... 

I will not be able to add lip the rest of the video anytime soon.

In the meantime, there are some open questions: What is the message that I wanted to bring across in the video? What does the hash tag dtmc stand for?

How can you truly celebrate an old school community manager? What does the C stand for in dtmc 

Do you have the answers to these pressing questions?

The most frustrating thing for a community manager is folks not participating, sitting on their hands, ;tilting their heads to the side and giving a blank stare.

Real joy comes from enthusiastic engagement. When it clicked and someone gets the joy of sharing and being an active part of the community. I think a lifetime of TV has put us in a perpetual consumer state.

So the greatest gift and thank you that you can give to a community manger is to contribute.

Therefore all Community Managers should from now on use the hash tag dtmc Don't Thank Me Contribute

I was tempted to use #goybc but no ;-)

Oh and of course the answer to the other questions is 42.

My favorite T-shirt is not the original SAP Mentor Rugby shirt, although that is a close second. It is a very old one somewhere in the back of my closet from the geeky band They Might be Giants and it says:

Music self-played is happiness self-made.

I would add: Jamming with friends and friends of friends is Nirvana.

This is like a blog post version of an episode of the VH1 hit show Behind the Music, where I will share how the SAP TechEd Jam band came to be and how close we came to a total train wreck. So much so that one SAP Mentor, who will remain nameless, mostly came to the event beer and pretzel in hand to see us derail.

Many amazing things start out as a crazy idea. SAP Mentors Matt Harding and David Hull-- both excellent musicians -- were coming to TechEd for years, and every time they talked about how cool it would be to get a band together and rock out. I love making music too, and when I heard about their dream, I joined Matt and Dave to help them make it come true. With the reintroduction of the SAP TechEd Clubhouse this year, the time was right.

Great minds think alike: as we were planning the Jam Band, the marvelous Marilyn Pratt was developing the idea for a drum circle. She even tried to create the biggest electronic drum circle ever by us using a little app on our smart phones. Unfortunately the technology isn't there yet. Lag on the Android phones made it unworkable.

Bjoern Goerke’s team also wanted to strengthen developer relations with a get-together in an informal setting.

Once the TechEd team realized the similarity in our goals, they brought us together and we pooled our ideas and resources. If it weren't for Bjoern paying for beer and pretzels, the TechEd team for the drums circle leader, and my boss Mark Yolton for the band equipment, the idea wouldn't have become reality. Thank you all for your faith in trying out something new.

Our goal from the beginning was to engage as many people as possible to join us in making music, singing and dancing. Mentor or not, we wanted to rock, but rock with you not for you.

As all community managers can attest, one of the toughest things is getting people from passive consuming to active participation, getting folks like the train wreck mentor out of the cynical observer role. The rule of thumb is that one highly active community member can draw nine active community members, and they draw 90 lurkers, also known as audience. We wanted to flip that and make 90% participants in one form or another.

The drum circle was great for breaking the ice, getting folks out of their thinking code mode and into rhythm and movement. It would have boomed even more, if we would have had real bongos and congas.

But I am getting ahead of myself as we first needed to get the rest of the band together, instruments sourced and songs selected. Alisdair Templeton joined us on guitar and many raised their hands for singing some of the songs. Turns out it was especially tough to secure a drummer, via the SAP Mentor network and the “Who’s coming” app on SAP TechEd we were able to connect with Marc-Étienne Desjardins, and boy was he a welcomed boost to our band!

Which songs to play? We used StreamWork to collect 25 song suggestions that were voted on and narrowed down to five.

At our first rehearsal on Monday night, it turned out that the keyboard amp was shot, we had no distortion pedals and no mics or stands for the singers. A couple of weeks back I cut the top skin off my left hand ring finger, it has healed, but it was too sensitive for me to play guitar.

So I tried to establish myself at (aka hide behind) the keyboard but Matt gently nudged me away saying: “We need you to be our front man.” I am convinced he just wanted me away from the keys, having heard me playing. That is how I became the reluctant front man of the Jam Band. That first rehearsal was a total disaster with no real drummer, no distortion and me forgetting/mixing the lines to the most important song our opening number: We will rock you from Queen.

Next day second rehearsal, what a relief to have Marc to keep a steady beat. Also Bryan Enochsturns out to be a great Brian Adams impersonator and he knows the lyrics to Summer of 69 too. You are hired. Marilyn, don’t walk away, we need your flute solo for the signature tune the Aussi anthem Down Under. It was actually one of my greatest joys having nudged Marilyn into bringing her flute and play along. Very nice. But still we were all over the place and sounded horrible. Note to self. Have mics and sound guy present for final rehearsal.

Now Wednesday was the day. That morning I also instigated the 6 am Run with the Wolfpack.

     Picture taken with Bjoern Goerke Smartphone.

Now I am not a big runner and that morning was a bit much for me, as you can see from the red head right after the run. Someone tweeted that doesn't look healthy.

Throughout the day I thought to myself: “you are such an idiot, you are exhausted and will crash right around 6 pm tonight when we play.” Thankfully the SAP Mentor schedule was packed and didn’t leave a lot of time to think.

The evening came and the drum circle started to engage people, get them moving. The beer helped too.

     Pictures by Ali Samieivafa

I spend most of the drum circle time giving out these plastic tubes to people standing in the periphery to get them to join the fun, and many of them did.

Hat tip to Bjoern Goerke for rapping his welcome address to the drumming of all of us.

     Pictures by Martin Gillet

Man that was gutsy, and it worked. The message came across: Welcome developers, have fun and don’t forget free indefinite licenses for some of the SAP software.

Bjoern was later overheard jokingly saying: “I'd take a keynote presentation any time over this." I don’t blame him, I actually admire him.

All of a sudden Chip Rodgerstaps me on the shoulder and says "OK the drum circle has run its course, time for you guys to start." Oh, oh stomach starts to cramp, need to go potty, but there is no time. It is also not the time to tell your fellow band members the truth, that you have never really played or sung in a rock band. All that didn't matter at that moment though. it was showtime.

“Drummer play it slow! Band I may stop and we start again if people are not engaged enough.  Let’s rock!” <Boom><Boom><Chuck><Boom><Boom><Chuck><Boom><Boom><Chuck> Buddy you’re a boy …

I gave it my all and to my own surprise it worked, we sounded halfway decent, actually we sounded surprisingly good and people were drumming, having a good time. But I felt that we could do better, and I also wanted to make it clear to everyone that WE all rock! After all the refrain is: We will rock you! So I stopped the band, stood on one of the chairs and said: “Come on, we can do better! One more time!” It really made a huge difference.

That was the seed of this going beyond being a band of mostly SAP Mentors playing music to a community happening.

I remembered almost all of the lyrics: the practice singing it with my daughter on the bicycle on the way to school paid off.

Next was Down Under for our many friends from the other side of the world and with Marilyn Pratt on the flute for the signature riff.

     Picture by Martin Gillet

She sounded marvelous, even though she later insisted that nothing came out and that someone cued up a tape. We didn’t even have the equipment to do something like that, you played it all by yourself Marilyn.

The theme of the night could have been: With a little help from our friends, which we played next with the little big singing help from Gretchen Lindquist. That fluent in and out of band members was another spark that encouraged others to join us on the mics. The beauty was, it didn’t matter whether you were an SAP Mentor not, just join the fun.

Next up Summer of 69 where Bryan Enochs took over as lead singer.

As far as I know it is the only video of our jam session. Check out the joy on the faces of everyone. One can also clearly hear that the off key singing originated from my microphone ;-)

After we finished our last song, someone came up to me and said: “This was so amazing, after three days of geeking out, and working with the head, it was exactly what was needed. Forget the concert tomorrow, this is it. My girlfriend is coming tonight and I am so bummed that she didn’t experience it, she often says you geeks are boring.”

Next was Philippe Rosset, asking me whether they could use one of the guitars, to play some Bossa Nova, which was funny as he knew that these were not our instruments, as he helped us to get them. “Sure, go ahead.”

     Picture by Martin Gillet

He and an excellent guitar player who’s name I unfortunately don’t have, played and sung: Girl from Ipanema. “She just doesn’t see …”. It was marvelous and set the precedent that allowed others to come up and play as well, and they did.

     Picture by Martin Gillet

I was super exhausted and excited, enjoying my first beer of the evening, when the music picked up again with a new combination of musicians. I was in heaven.

     Picture by Joshua Fletcher

That was the time I stood next to Greg Myers who said: “This is epic. I mean us last year playing Elvis was amazing, but this is epic.” He did a great job with projecting the lyrics on a monster screen, so that everyone could sing along.

I was beaming and enjoyed every moment of it, you can see the beaming on all band members.

     Picture by Martin Gillet

If we take a step back and analyze what happened that night, the SAP Community Network mostly lead by SAP Mentors came alive and had an amazing time together.

That was only possible because of this core group of people with strong connections of trust. The beauty is, that this Jam Session greatly strengthened these ties and drew more people into our midst, SAP TechEd participants that now want to participate more, want to engage. The pulsing heart of our strong community was beating load that night.

Thank you all for joining. We all rocked!

P.S. It will be interesting to analyze the Tweet stream of that evening. My guess is, that it didn't even register, as people were totally immersed in the activity, engaged in the moment, there was no time for tweeting. If that is true, it would indicate, that our social media analytics are still not capturing the epic moments within our community. I pinged Greg Myers about it and he said that social media is great leading up to an event to make people aware, and after to tell the story, but during the jam he didn't even think about his smartphone. He also remarked, that you can only be experiencing these kind of Epic moments if you put yourself out there, don't hide in your hotel room. Engage!

P.P.S. People sometimes have a tough time to understand what we are trying to do with the SAP Mentor initiative. Someone even close to it recently commented: "You are mostly keeping a bunch of guys happy." -- Aka it has no real impact on SAP's business. I realized, that it isn't obvious to everyone, hard to measure or even to articulate. What we are doing is creating a safe space, a fun atmosphere around SAP for the inherent creativity and joy of people to prosper. A space where it is OK to fail, where there are helping hand that make sure you don't, where people celebrate your ingenuity and effort, where you get inspired by what others come up with and implement. Like Martin Gillet who brought to SAP TechEd the monster yellow SAP Mentor balloon that you may have seen floating around the show floor. Find it in at least one picture above. It is the SAP Mentor magic, which is infectious, radiates out way beyond the little group of mentors as it did during this SAP TechEd Jam Band night, where everything fell into place and a good times was had by all. Is that changing SAP's bottom line? Yes it does, although tough to proof, but that is for another post.

Thank you Greg Myers and Jon Reed who improved an earlier version of this post. 

It is always tough to select new SAP Mentors. Many think they all should be diamond SCN contributors and have organized InnoJams in their local home town like Novosibirsk [Isn't that an amazing city name? In school we once memorized all the cities on the Trans Siberian Express. No other town would roll off the tongue like Novosibirsk] Truth is, not all SAP Mentors are super active on SCN.

I stress one more time, that activity on SCN is an important factor in the selection process, but not the only or the deciding factor of whether someone becomes an SAP Mentor or not. After all we are not SCN Mentors, but SAP Mentors. The larger ecosystem of SAP goes way beyond SCN. The new SAP Mentors below reflect that.

As we have our roots in the original SAP Developer Network many of us mentors are technology focused.  Again, that isn't limiting us, the spirit of SAP mentorship: the willingness to do your part to improve SAP and it's offering, to share your expertise and engage with the larger SAP community is not limited to tech folks. This time we even added a retail analyst to the mentor mix.

SAP's Asia Pacific region especially China added many mentors. Our hope and experience is, that a certain critical mass is very beneficial to the impact SAP Mentors are having in a region.

If we only could do something about the time zones we would be so happy. In his Novel Eastern Standard Tribe Cory Doctorow writes about a group of people that no matter where they are in the world they always adhere to the time that is in New York aka: Eastern Standard Time. That way everyone is always in sync You are in sync with your tribe, but not with the world around you. Doesn't work for us.

Super excited about these new SAP Mentors. Can't wait to work closer with them.

Here they are in no particular order:

Jansi Rani Murugesan Country: India Company: Infineon Asia Pte ltd, Singapore

Area of Expertise: Change control Management, Custom Code Lifecycle Management, Business process managment, Incident Management Etc.

Bio: Jansi Rani Murugesan is a consultant with Infineon Asia Pte ltd, Singapore. She has more than 7 years of experience, which includes 6 years of active involvement in IT as SAP Basis and Solution Manager consultant.

Her tireless contributions made her the SCN Member of the month earlier this year.

Peter Langner Country: Germany Company: ADventas Consulting

Area of Expertise: Accounting, Logistics, SAP ECC, SAP NetWeaver, SAP NetWeaver CE, Solution Manager, ABAP, SAP Script, Smart Forms, Adobe Interactive Forms

Bio: Peter Langner is an experienced SAP project manager, business consultant and developer.

Together with Renald Wittwer Peter organized the SAP Inside Track in Hamburg last year. They made a quite professional looking video from footage of that day. Well done. 

To foster the integration with Sybase from the comunity side I am really happy to add 3 members of Team Sybase: Bruce Armstrong, Yakov Werde as well as Sue Dunnell who is coordinating that effort on the SAP side.

Bruce Armstrong Country: USA Company: Integrated Data Services.
Area of Expertise: SAP Power Builder

Bio:  Bruce Armstrong is a Lead Developer with the Los Angeles office of Integrated Data Services (IDS). He is a PowerBuilder MVP as well as a charter member of TeamSybase (originally Team PowerSoft) and has been using PowerBuilder since version 1.0b. He is the editor-in-chief for the PowerBuilder Developer's Journal in which he has authored numerous articles and at one point a monthly news column. He was a contributing author to SYS-CON's PowerBuilder 4.0 Secrets of the Masters and one of the editors and authors for PowerBuilder 9: Advanced Client/Server Development by SAMS. Prior to joining IDS eight years ago, he was a consultant with Kforce Consulting for 10 years doing PowerBuilder development for firms such as The Boeing Company, Investment Technology Group, Western Asset Management, Hughes Space and Communications and Rockwell International.

Yakov Werde Country: USA Company: eLearnIt LLC

Area of Expertise: SAP Power Builder

Bio: Yakov Werde MsEd is the proprietor of eLearnIT LLC, a NE USA based PowerBuilder training and consulting firm.  Yakov has been a certified SAP/Sybase Instructor and Developer since 1995 and is an outspoken enthusiast of Sybase technology.  Yakov personally trained thousands of professional software developers on all aspects of enterprise application development using the PowerBuilder platform.  As a senior application developer and system architect, Yakov began his professional career writing business applications under CP/M and MP/M on s100 bus computers and progressed to a stint at IBM as a member of the PC AT ROM BIOS / NET BIOS development team. In his independent consulting career Yakov has built and maintains systems across a wide spectrum of enterprises.  Now a 17 year PowerBuilder veteran, Sybase MVP, [TeamSybase] member, and PowerBuilder .NET pioneer, Yakov, an educational and entertaining presenter, is well known in the global PowerBuilder developer community through his frequent articles in PowerBuilder Developer Journal and ISUG Journal, and annual presentations at the PowerBuilder Developers Conference.

Sue Dunnell Country: USA Company: SAP

Area of Expertise: SAP PowerBuilder, Developers, Community Engagement

Bio: Sue has been working with PowerBuilder since she joined Powersoft in 1996. She worked in technical support, delivered product training internally and at user conferences,  and moved to product management where she managed the PowerBuilder business, and brought DataWindow.NET and PocketBuilder to market.  She’s worked closely with hundreds of PowerBuilder customers, building relationships and growing the PowerBuilder community. She created the MVP team to recognize key developers and contributors in the community, and communicates regularly with the customer base through newsletters, a blog, and journal articles. Prior to joining Powersoft, Sue earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in Criminal Justice, and taught various courses at Northeastern University and did part-time private investigative work. Her inner nerd broke through and she returned to Northeastern’s Graduate School of Engineering to pursue a career in computer programming and IT. She is married to her highschool sweetheart, and has 3 kids – 21, 18, and 11, as well as a tightly wound Australian Shepherd.

Corey Adams Country: New Zealand
Areas of Experties: Business Objects – Architecture; Webi; Design; Federation, Wherescape Red, Project Management, Business Analysis, Data Warehousing, RoamBI, RoamBI Flow

Bio: NZ Based BI Practitioner, Advocate and Evangelist - you won’t find me on the corner, or an altar, but I’m still preaching; The End is BI, Refresh, Refresh

Corey works for a customer that is an SAP BW house, which was an existing Business Objects customer. Their story is representative of the requirements and frustrations of legacy Business Objects customers, Business Objects on BW, and now Business Objects on BW on HANA.Can't wait to hear more of them. Our first New Zealander. Love that country, if only it wasn't so far away.

Alexandra Carvalho Country: Australia Company: BI Group Australia

Area of Expertise: BW, Business Objects, Data Warehousing, Mobile BI, Big Data, Predictive Analysis, Agile BI, BI Strategy, Governance, Enterprise Architecture

Bio: Working as an SAP consultant for 16 years, mostly in SAP BI. Done SAP BI for the following areas: TPM (Trades Promotion Management), IPM (Intellectual Property Management), IS-U CCS including Smart Meter Analytics, CRM, BPS and IP, Business Objects (Dashboards, Crystal and Webi), BW (from ETL to BEx reporting), APO-DP and SNP, PS-CD Public Sector Collection and Disbursement, SRM and ECC (FI, CO-PA, SD, MM, PM, HR). Is also an ABAPer. Entrepreneur,  Speaker, Blogger, Photographer, Scuba Diver, Marathon Runner, Yogi.

Highly motivated individual with a broad SAP experience base which would be of assistance to others who require mentoring assistance.  She is interested in helping others and in doing so further her own knowledge base.

Fred Verheul Country: Netherlands

Area of Expertise: Core areas are ABAP, Process Integration. NetWeaver. At the moment I'm focusing on On-Demand, BRFplus, NW Gateway and Event Insight.

Bio: working with SAP software as of 1998.I live in the Netherlands with my wife, daughter (age 2) and two cats.Hobbies include SAP, programming, bridge, music (played violin myself, search for my SCNotty 2011 video), reading, and of course my daughter.

Fred has been a very active member and influencer of the community for a while and he's became a familiar face in the local SAP Inside Tracks and SAP InnoJams. He falls into that category of "what he has not been an SAP Mentor yet". He got many of nominations.

Gary Hooker Country: Australia FAHCSIA

Area of Expertise: SAP BW, BI, ERP, Netweaver, HR, R/3, Business Objects, FICO

Bio:Approx 15 years of SAP-related experience, Approximately 33 years Australian Public Service experience with a strong background in finance/accounting, budgeting, procurement, HR/payroll and SAP IT areas working in a number of different agencies including Defence, Australian Public Service Commission, Transport, Civil Aviation Authority, Social Security, Centrelink, DIAC, AirServices Australia and FaHCSIA

Love that he is from a customer and active in the Mastering SAP BI conference coordination. 

Greg Capps Country: USA Company: Coca Cola

Area of Expertise: SAP Security, Risk Management, Sarbanes-Oxley, Internal Auditing

Bio: SAP Security and Project Management, SOX Controls TestingRisk Management, Process Mapping and Segregation of Duties Analysis, AS/400 Systems Administrator, RPG and ABAP Program Development Mainframe CICS Development.

Greg is a longtime ASUG volunteer who has shared his expertise generously both at ASUG and TechEd conferences and virtually via web casts and blogs. One of his recent SCN blog is a top blogs in the GRC space.

Moya Watson Country: USA Company: SAP Research

Area of Expertise: Diversity, Communications, Anti-Bullying, SAP Research Cross-Prototyping, Video Sharing, Collaboration, Bridging Gaps or Falling into the Void, Sustainability, Connected Cars, Technical Documentation, API/SDK Documentation, Lapsed QA Engineering...

Bio: Moya Watson has been working in the software industry in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1991. Since 2001 at SAP, she has been forging innovative approaches to communication of all kinds, from standard documentation to technical documentation to collaborative experimental platforms. She is currently a technology evangelist and prototyping project manager on the Cross-Prototyping team in SAP Research, and enjoys fostering innovation — particularly communications-related innovation — and the products thereof – via communities of all kinds within SAP. Outside of SAP, Moya is passionate about the potential that online organizing brings to the causes of social justice and equality. And everywhere, she is interested in particular in the vast spaces between formal messaging and raw expression.

Moya was the driving force behind the creation of the It gets better video where she was able to get even Jim Snabe to participate. Update: Someone tweeted that this video tells more about what kind of company SAP is than 100 press releases A Adrian Bowles @ajbowles Industry Analyst tweeted: It [this video] will shape my opinion of SAP more than 1,000 briefings. Well done. She is also the first SAP Mentor within the SAP Research organization and we hope for greater collaboration with that team too.

Paula Rosenblum Country: USA Company: RSR Resarch
Area of Expertise: Retail

Bio: Paula is widely recognized as one of the top analysts in the retail industry. She formerly served as Vice President of Research & Content at Retail Systems Alert Group (RSAG), and as Vice President of Aberdeen Group’s Retail Research practice. She was also retail research director for AMR Research. Previous to that, Paula spent over 20 years as a retail technology executive and CIO. She works with Wall Street Analysts and various industry trade associations on a regular basis.

Presentation Replay: Global Retailing Conference 2012

Check out that video and you see first hand Paula's amazing knowledge around Retail. Can't wait to engage with her around SAP's solution in that space. 

Prashanth Padmanabhan Country: USA Company: SAP

Area of Expertise: Product Management, Product Marketing, Enterprise Human Capital Management Solutions, Software as a Service SaaS, Distributed Development, Collaboration Systems for Distributed teams.
Web 2.0 Learning 2.0, Mobile Applications, SuccessFactors

Bio: Prashanth is Sr. Director, Product Management in the Human Capital Management (HCM) group of SAP. He is responsible for the design of SAP and HCM OnDemand products and market development for OnDemand services. He is currently leading the effort to design and provide SAP - SuccessFactors Hybrid solutions for North American Customers.

Prashanth fills a key need area on the Mentor team given his role with SAP/SuccessFactors, he is an outside the box thinker, active in social media and has consistently provided very good content in his personal blog about SAP & SuccessFactor.

Tim Guest Country: United Kingdom Company: Frontline Consultancy & Business Services
Area of Expertise: SAP Business One, Mobility, In Memory and the advances of HANA, Sustainability & Corporate Responsibility and Business Intelligence

Bio: Over seven years technology experience with a good understanding of Infrastructure, Virtualisation and a first hand knowledge of how SAP can optimise business processes. Prior to my current role I was involved in fixed price SAP projects, taking business requirements and helping design solutions for businesses of all sizes. I pride myself on networking & relationship building and have a large list of contacts who pass business to me and vice versa.

Actively working with the UK Business One user base to inspire inclusion, innovation and creativity. Helping the SAP User Group to organise SIG's and to actively increase membership of Business One users. He uses SCN and the SAP user group as part of his Sales pitch and actively encourage our customers to get involved and join the community. It sets us apart from our rivals at Sage / Microsoft. He also designed a programme to work with 18 year old school leavers, coaching them in resume writing and interview techniques.

Zimkhita Buwa Country: South Africa

Area of Expertise: BI and SAP Strategy Management

Bio: Independent SAP BI / Strategy Management Consultant, Train various SAP BI courses, ie TBW10, TBW20,BW305,BW310.

Zimkhita has been extremely active in the BI Community in South Africa where she has been on the BI Steering Committee. She has also presented at various conferences, i.e. SAPHILA, Mastering BI South Africa and Australia. She also mentors postgraduate students from UCT.

Side Note: I just listened to the TED radio hour about Africa, eye opening new perspective very inspiring.

Vance Pan Country: China Company: DataCVG

Area of Expertise: SAP Analytics Solution, specially Business Intelligence Solutions

Bio: Vance is a fan of SAP Business Intelligence Solutions. He has over 10 years’ experience with SAP Business Intelligence products suite, and has deep understanding about China market and customer requirements. Vance was a key member of SAP BOBJ product management in China Lab and later on he joined DataCVG as VP of Strategy, they are one of the largest BOBJ partners in China. Vance demonstrates strong willing and ability evangelizing SAP Business Intelligence Solution in China market.

Wei Zhu (Ethan) Country: China

Area of Expertise: Business Intelligence

Bio: Wei Zhu is an SAP BusinessObjects BI consultant, who has excellent skill for Dashboard Designer, Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence. He is one of the winners of 2010 dashboard design campaign in China. He actively participant the BusinessObjects events and often voices his opinion, sharing his experience regarding working with BusinessObjects Solutions with his peers.

Xumin Zhao Country: China

Area of Expertise: SAP ESA, SAP NetWeaver

Bio: Mr Xumin Zhao has advanced technology know-how, deep understanding and rich practical experience in SAP ESA, SAP NetWeaver and related products architecture and design. He has more than 15 years working experience in SAP field and worked as a Chief Consultant and the Manager of Technology Consulting Department. He was in charge of consultants' training, business development and technology development. His achievement are IT architecture strategy planning, implementation technology of SAP products, system integration, etc.

Alexander Andrenacci Country: Singapore Company: Accenture

Area of Expertise: ERP-SAP, Program Management, Global and Regional SAP deployments, Business Transformation Programs, IT Strategy, Business Intelligence, Analytics.

Bio:19 years experience in ERP/Transformation Projects. SAP Analytics & BI Lead for APAC. Worked across many industry verticals (Oil & Gas, Telecommunications, and Utilities) although his main focus remains in FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods). For the last 10 years Alex has led two SAP Regional Deployments across Asia/Africa/Middle East/Russia.

Alexander is a strong advocate for SAP solutions - wall to wall. He is leading Accenture's Big Bets initiative all around SAP: Mobility, Analytics and NextGeneration SAP. He is involved in demand generation and go to market activities with SAP APJ and sponsors Accenture's Innovation Centers for SAP (focused on Analytics). Our first SAP Mentor in Singapore. Very exciting.

Yariv Zur Country: Israel Company: SAP

Area of Expertise: NetWeaver, UI technologies (HTML5, Web Dynpro)

Bio: Solution Manager / Product Strategist at SAP. Focusing mainly on User Interface and User Productivity in the Enterprise world. Vast development background and deep involvement with community, journalism and Web 2.0 paradigms.

Yariv is one of the SAP people that is most outside looking, speading information about new technology and ideas in blogs and speeches during Techeds. He makes great efforts to insure that people with similar interest and skills gets introduced to each other. That treat makes him  a catalyst when it comes to community building.Yariv is one of these SAP employees that is constantly trying to expand the developer community and making SAP easier to use. Really glad that he is able to join the SAP Mentor Wolfpack. He is making a huge difference in Israel.

Please join me in welcoming our new SAP Mentors. Many will be at one of the upcoming SAP TechEds. Don't be shy to walk up to us and say hello.

Public SAP Mentor Webinars where the new SAP Mentors will introduce themselves and share some of their expertise will be announced soon too.

Some call the SAP Mentors also the sense makers. - Or may be it is just me that is making this up, as it is already late on the Friday before the big event in Orlando: ASUG Annual Conference co-located with Sapphire.

Every day close to closing of the show floor the SAP Mentors come together at the ASUG Lounge [to the left of the show floor entrance from concourse south] to make sense of what we heard and have seen throughout the day. Also to share the things that one should not miss on the show floor. As I said, making sense of all the information that is thrown at us.

Here a picture from lat year:

As always with the mentors, great insights in a light hearted atmosphere and a fun end of a long day.

Please join us and share what you experienced throughout the day.

Monday: 4:00-4:30pm just before Bill McDermott is closing out the day with his Keynote.

Tuesday: 5:30-6:00pm we will have the ASUG lounge for ourselves, but may have to evoke the human megaphone, as ASUG will have closed down their operations already, so no microphone. I may bring a megaphone ;-)

Wednesday: 4:45 we will grab the microphone from the last presenter and close the whole show with a last hurrah!

Location: ASUG Lounge on the Show Floor!

Where is Waldo the ASUG Lounge? Top left highlighted by the red circle.

Hope you can join us one, two or all three days. Going to be fun.