By: pallavi.chakravorty@timesgroup.com

SAP TechEd, the premier technology event, has been a big draw for enterprise architects, developers, engineers and other IT professionals from across the globe. The event is an annual staple from SAPs stable organised in the US, Europe and India and it received a similar response in Bengaluru this year.

By definition, TechEd is the essential technical training and networking conference for IT professionals who develop, implement, innovate and upgrade SAP solutions. With a vision to help participants discover new functionality, optimisation and security practices from SAP developers and product experts using SAP solutions, the conference provides a fantastic opportunity to informally network with the technology experts, senior executives from SAP and various industry and technology peers from around the world. This years highlight was the keynote address by Juergen Mueller, CTO and Executive Board Member, SAP SE who talked about the solutions that SAP offers and how the platform is evolving from being a digital one to becoming a business technology platform.

A big part of the conference was the education sessions, which were grouped into seven tracks and 32 learning journeys. The journeys were designed to help participants explore their educational path based on their role, career level or interest. The types of sessions were Road-map sessions to get a detailed understanding of SAPs current roadmaps; Hands-on workshops expert-led exercises and training; Demo-rich lectures deep dive with SAP technology and platform experts; SAP CodeJam collaborating with developers during hands-on coding sessions; Code Review assessing real code examples and learning new tips and techniques.

Since TechEd is all about learning and is attended by a big community of developers, hands-on exercises are critical. Hundreds of hands-on exercises were offered at the event in the form of classrooms and at the developers garage for participants to experiment.

In all, there were 265+ classroom lectures, 310+ hours of hands-on exercises, 1,000+ hours of application coding, and 800+ hours of demo. This year, the focus was on delivering intelligent enterprise. Participants learnt about intelligent technologies and business technology platform.

The event experienced a heavy footfall like each year Leaders Speak:

HELPING BUSINESSES BECOME TRUE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISES: SINDHU GANGADHARAN, SVP and MD SAP Labs India

When I joined SAP in Bengaluru in 1999, we were a small team of just over 200 people. Today, we have grown to be the second-largest R&D lab in SAPs network of 17 labs across 20 countries. We are a strong family of 13,000+ people in India and are growing pretty fast working in close collaboration with our customers, and partners.

What is also unique is that we have the entire breadth of SAPs product portfolio represented out of one location. The market in this region is very different compared to some of the other global markets. India, as a country, is going through a wave of digitalisation, and we are witnessing many dramatic shifts in the way businesses are transforming themselves leveraging emerging technologies such as AI, ML, RPA, IoT, etc.

On the capital markets day in New York, SAP outlined to grow its cloud revenue from $5 billion to $15 billion in 2023. A lot of that growth will be based on the work that we will be driving out of India. A big part of this growth will also be fuelled through our partner ecosystem. We are privileged to have a huge ecosystem of 600+ partners in India. We are proud of the fact that six of the 16 global partners helping our customers go digital, are from India.

With SAP Startup Studio, our in-house startup accelerator which works on cutting-edge and futuristic products, and our strong base of in-house talent, we help our customers solve their critical business challenges.

MOVING TOWARDS BEING A BUSINESS TECH PLATFORM: JUERGEN MUELLER, CTO and Executive Board Member, SAP SE

Namaste! I have been to many TechEd events, but this year its the first time that I attended them as the SAP CTO. I wanted to deliver keynotes at all the three TechEd events in Barcelona, Las Vegas and in Bengaluru. And I must say I am thrilled to be here.

Today, I want to talk about how we support companies with our end-to-end solutions. I also want to showcase our new Business Technology Platform as SAPs new central building block for companies to become intelligent enterprises. This platform helps companies connect business processes and experiences. It allows them to make confident decisions based on data by bringing together everything a company needs to do so: data management, analytics, AI, blockchain, application development and integration services on an open cloud platform. We are convinced that our Business Technology Platform is the fastest way to turn data into business value.

SAP technology helps store vast amounts of data generated by consumers, combine them with operational data and external sources using our database and data management solutions. We generate necessary business insights, even without being an analytics expert with SAP Analytics portfolio. We have been incrementally evolving our digital platform to move towards a business technology platform. What does that mean? First, we bring HANA and Analytics closer together with its own platform. Second, we provide easier access to SAP data. Third, we provide business services like billing as a service, document processing as a service, tax as a service. Fourth, we are much more open, for example by including certain Hyperscale services; and fifth, we make the business technology platform easier to consume also from a commercial perspective with our cloud platform enterprise agreement.

The SAP Cloud Platform is very important to us as there are about 30,000 productive applications running on the platform, and we ourselves run more than 500 productive applications on the cloud platform. We are fully committed to the platform and Cloud Foundry Environment and we continue to make them evolve.

SAP Cloud Platform is available on Hyperscalers infrastructures on Azure, on AWS, on Google, on Ali Cloud and also on SAP data centres.

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TechEd A premier technology event to learn, innovate and network - Economic Times