After running around Oxford Street and visits to the VFS Global office in London last week, finally the Spanish embassy has granted me ESTADOS Schengen for 5 days. Madrid now awaits so does an immense amount of lectures, hands on and networking sessions.
This will be the 5th SAP TechEd I will be going to and the excitement never ceases to exist. Each and every year we see the growing amount of attendees and it should be a testimonial to the adoption of SAP world wide, the growing number of SAP customer base and of course the sheer amount of workforce involved in implementing SAP solutions.
One of the challenges consultants face is to convince their management on the needs of attending events like the TechEd. As a SAP mentor, I am thankful to SAP that by extending us invites to these events around the world, it makes the convincing much easier.
Since sometime this year, it has been all about HANA. SAP is indeed all GAGA over HANA (and rightly so!). Though it might be a topic that might make the Analytic guys go weak in their knees, I think I will give it a pass. HANA is definitely massive so I have made sure that I am not completely left out. You will find me scribbling on my notepad, taking notes amongst my doodles during the lectures 'SAP Runs SAP: HANA/InMemory Solutions' & 'Deep Dive into the SAP In-Memory Technology, Strategy, and Roadmap'.
But then HANA is not where my heart belongs. I am an Integration guy and I will spare no chance to be in bed with 'Business Process Management, Integration and Collaboration'.
NW 7.3 / 7.31 releases and especially the Process Orchestration track is what I am interested in so in case you run into me in any of the lecture halls or at the Pods, please do say Hello or the 'Hola'! It's my first ever travel to the country of Spain and I will love to have the company of fellow consultants and Mentors when I plan to dine on 'Tapas' and yes indeed a glass of authentic 'Sangria' towards the evening.
Apart from the usual business of TechEd, I intend to make the best of my time visiting customers and catch up with some of the best SAP Mentors in the Integration space today. http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/profile/Michal+Krawczyk
Mike has promised me that he will help me build an adapter of my own in 15 minutes though he mentions 5 days is what it will really takes 🙂 Well mate, a promise is a promise! I also see from the Agenda builder that daniel.graversen/blog is in town as well. Daniel, when you are not busy hosting your networking sessions, lets catch up over a coffee. I think its time I got myself some tips on documentation and other trick n treats!
Apart from that there is the wider Mentor circle, a talent pool with immense experience to whom I can only look up to, try, learn and be inspired. Then there is always Aslan, Mr Finnern and the lady Pratt!
Madrid, aquí vengo!
PS: If anyone can trade his/her Hands On session or can sneak me into a Fully Booked Conference room for the 'SAP NetWeaver Process Integration: Integration Flows Deep Dive' session, I promise this will not be forgotten ever! It was too late by the time I started building the agenda that I realized it was a full house, popular sell out!
