Meet: Jovan, Ainsley, Thomas and Conrad. Four students from the UK that participated at last year’s SAP YRS Festival of Code and won the SAP Award for ‘Best in Show’ with their SmartMove mobile app. The YRS (Young Rewired State) Festival of Code is a one week event where student coders 18 and under get together in groups and build a mobile or web-based app with the help and support from volunteer developers and mentors from all over the UK.
The SAP award included a trip to an SAP or industry event for developers which they got to do earlier this month. They flew first to Walldorf for a day tour of the SAP campus (SAP headquarters) including the SAP Data Center in Rot. The campus tour started with a tele-presence call with Thomas Grassl, head of SAP’s Developer Relations team, who was in Palo Alto at the time (it was midnight for him!) but wanted to welcome the group as he had previously met them during last year’s YRS hackathon (he was one of the judges).
Then they met with Jochen Keller and Philipp Weiss from the HR corporate team who had a couple of activities prepared for the group: first off, a visit to the SAP Pavilion to learn about SAP’s 40 year history through interactive displays. Then, a tour of the collaboration rooms where developers get to collaborate with one another as well as with end users, designers, etc. in order to build better and user friendly apps. Lastly, Jochen and Philipp gave them an overview of SAP’s internship opportunities.
After lunch, the group headed to Rot for a tour of SAP’s data center. Tobias Baro welcomed them and talked to them about SAP’s security practices for both the data and the infrastructure they have there. He walked the group through the different spaces in the data center conversing with them about data speeds, server capacity, backup plans, etc. Needless to say, the students were very excited and impressed with SAP’s technology and security measures!
The next day, the group attended CeBIT in Hannover, one of the largest tech fairs in the world. Their first impression: “This is much bigger than anything I’ve ever seen before,” says Ainsley. “It took us 15 minutes just to get to the SAP stand!” (http://www.sap-cebit.de/en/watch-out-super-talent/). The group got to experience the SAP HANA energy consumption interactive demo, sat at the driver’s seat in the SAP-BMW connected car display and saw the latest SAP mobile apps hosted in the Samsung exhibit. They also had time to walk around and check some of the other exhibitors at the event.
Keep an eye out for these four young coders! They are serious about their craft and interested in continue to learn about SAP’s technology, platforms and opportunities for developing really amazing apps.
Lasting impressions…
There are lots of new technologies that might make it easy for young developers to start and build better apps than they already can. Conrad
Fostering innovation and development of new products through AppHauses – an impressive concept for innovation. Tom
We talked with one of the developers who talked to us about lowering barriers of entry to developers making free stuff available to them – we have many options. Ainsley
It’s impressive to see that SAP is trying to get people to work together and collaborate better through friendly spaces. Jovan
Watch this short video about their thoughts on SAP's developer programs: http://youtu.be/3IgWOrRtM9c