APJ: International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2014), Auckland, New Zealand, (14th - 17th December 2014)

[Former Member]

SAP University Alliances participated at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) which took place from 14 to 17 December 2014 in Auckland, New Zealand.  It was the major annual meeting of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), which has over 4,000 members representing universities in over 95 countries worldwide. This year, over 1,200 participants from around the world participated in 2014 ICIS which included 60 sessions and 180 presentations, in addition to keynotes, CIO panels and research panels. The theme of ICIS 2014 was Building a Better World through Information Systems and it was hosted by The University of Auckland Business School, in Auckland, New Zealand, a long-time SAP UA member.

Keynote Presentation

Mr Graeme Riley, Managing Director, SAP New Zealand gave a 10 minute keynote speech to a packed auditorium during the Conference kick-off on the new SAP strategy and that the industry and worldwide enterprises need academics to help develop talents on technologies around Big data, social, mobile and other technologies.  Graeme also announced that UCC Queensland University of Technology as the SAP Big Data Innovation Centre would become operational come Q1 2015.

Pre-Conference Workshop

As a global AIS sponsor, SAP had a full day pre-conference workshop held on 14 December at the University of Auckland Business School.  There were a total of 27 participants from 22 Universities around the world. David Taylor from University Competence Center APJ of Queensland University of Technology, Professor Venky Shankararaman of Singapore Management University and Crispian Tan delivered different segments of the hands-on and interactive workshops – Introduction to SAP HANA (David Taylor), Introduction to SAP Analytics – SAP Lumira (Venky Shankararaman) and Big Data and Design Thinking (Crispian Tan). 

SAP University Alliances Booth

SAP University Alliances (UA) had a booth for interaction opportunities with the ICIS participants. Crispian Tan and David Taylor shared with the crowd on what SAP and SAP UA can offer them through our strategic Go-to-market 6 pillars: Learn, Apply, Share, Recruit, Empower and Impact.  We met over 40 academics with many of them being new leads and existing schools wanting to learn on the newer areas that we could offer.

We also had the good opportunity for Prof Helmut Krcmar from Technology University of Munich and Chairman of AIS and Prof Michael Rosemann, Head of the School of IT from Queensland University of Technology to visit the UA booth.   On 16 December, on behalf of UA, we also wished Prof Krcmar a happy 60^th birthday in person!