On 23 January 2014, my classmates and I had the privilege of visiting SAP Labs in Bangalore. We were a group of 53 students and 3 teachers from the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the PSG College of Technology from Coimbatore. As soon as we reached the campus, we were met by Archit from the MARCom team who was our host for the day. We recieved our visitor badges and were taken to a hall where Archit gave us an introduction on SAP. He really caught everyone's attention by giving us examples of where all SAP Technology exists around us in all the various industries. He explained through real time scenarios such as how SAP influences the Mobile world, banking, Indian Railways and many more industries. Archit was probably the first person ever to catch my classmates' attention for so long since he put what SAP does into such simple words and also made everyone laugh and think in the process. Archit also gave us some stats related to SAP such as the fact that SAP works with 200,000+ customers across 120 countries which left people in shock. After that, the interest was aroused and everyone was extremely curious to know more in detail about the various SAP applications.
Next we had George from the solution experience department give us a more techincal idea of how SAP solutions work. He gave us insight into the Five market categories that SAP deals with - mobile, applications, analytics, SAP HANA Platform and Partners. He then spoke about SAP Fiori and its properties such as role-based, responsive, simple , coherent and instant value. Our next speaker was Deepthi Lakshmi who tried to give us a better understanding on SAP HANA. She started out by listing out the basic features of SAP HANA such as Multi-core Architecture, in-memory Database, row and column store, Massive Parallel Processesing etc. She then realized that many people weren't able to follow some of the terms and started drawing out exactly how row store differs from column store and how in- memory and other features work. She ended her session with a demo of an app designed for a Mclaren F1 racecar which showed how SAP worked with analyzing each and every single part of each car.
We then proceeded for lunch and then to the most awaited part of the day - the Campus Tour. Archit started off the tour by giving us a few details about the Campus. We learned that 6500 employees work in the Bangalore Campus, 6000 of which are core developers and also about the 72 interest groups available in the premises. We were showed around all the buildings and he explained what happens in each of the buildings. The campus was so beautiful and green which was really refreshing to see. We even visited a couple of offices where the developers sat in their cubicles. From the gym to the library, everything in the campus fascinated us as we did not expect to see such amazing facilities in a company.
As the Student Ambassador, I was really happy that we were given the opportunity to visit the SAP Labs. It was only possible thanks to the University Alliances Program. They coordinated the entire visit and planned the agenda for the day perfectly. The hospitality shown to us was probably the best part as everyone was so friendly. The visit has definitely created more awareness among my fellow classmates about the latest technologies and the feedback that I recieved was great as well. The insight that we got into how a company of such a large magnitude works will definitely benefit us in the future and I know that each and every single person would hope that they could one day work at a company like SAP.
