Getting Technical

What follows is the text stream as I listened to the keynote from Leo Apotheke Co-CEO SAP from his keynote this morning. You can find the webcast here.

World in flatter and faster.

Business networks are the answer.

Business network creates barriers to entry, creates competitive advantage.

Operation excellence is the entry point to the network.

Network will expel the weakest link.

John Clarke – CIO of Nokia

Growth constrained by IT. Profitability constrained by IT

384 million devices last year made by Nokia

Nokia has the world’s best supply chain say AMR.

Moving to be a mobile services company.

Connect you to what matters most

No longer one size fits all – different devices for different markets.

Increase in research to market products that capture the imagine of customers.

4000 active concurrent users on the Nokia system

Global single instance

Near real time visibility of information.

Quick financial closing.

Strict enforcement on policies.

Technology enabler in phones and in network esp SAP

Lesson from Tesco – “Better Simpler Cheeper”

Paul McGarry – CIO EMEA Colgate-Palmolive

$13B sales last year

Long time SAP Customers.

99% of business is on SAP in over 100 Countries.

Streamlining order processing, taking out complexity of the system.

Profitability increased as SAP was rolled out across the business.

Leo

Moving to small and midsize companies (SME)

All in One and ByDesign share key points with the Business Suite.

Supply chain demo by Ian Kimball.

Scenario with a business network

Forecasting or demand demand based production.

This would look great if you were a supply chain organisation.

Business all in One

New pre-configured, pre-tested. All in One by IBM and HP

Selecting the right data to mine is critical BI + BO have the tools.

Broadband, data storage, processing all cheep – bring better analytics to managers without a Phd in Statistics.

Co-Innovation – SAP’s own network.

SAP + RIM

Jeff McDowall from RIM

“The future of enterprise mobility software”

Lot of overlap with RIM and SAP.

Think what blackberry did to email. Trying to now do the same with enterprise software.

Demo-ing with Blackberry Bold 3G “IPhone Killer”

Start with calendar

One click to account.

One hand and two clicks to get to amount.

One click to map with directions.

Log phone call with call notes and updates live to CRM.

Access to data is quick.

Jeff presents Leo a BlackBerry Bold as a gift.

Leo

Enterprise Support

Trying to make it easier for you.

SAP Enterprise Support – only one thing to do call SAP.

I arrived in Berlin a day early so I could catch up with some friends and then meet up with the guys who were in town for the conference for dinner. I had a great lunch with old friends who has a bunch of people round for lunch which was a pleasant way to meet the real people of Berlin. Later that evening we took at drive around the sights and given that is was over 20 years since I was in Berlin last, a few things had changed.

Firstly, and most significantly,  there was no more wall.

This brick line traces the path of the wall and is a ghostly reminder of what once was.

This little knot of tourists was hearing the story of the wall and how approximately 240 or so people where shot in the no mans land between the two walls.

 

Amazingly, there are one or two watchtowers left and this one was just a stones throw from the new Potsdamer Platz that my intrepid guide knew where to find.

The Potsdamer Platz has been massively redeveloped into a new shopping entertainment centre, which is never complete without a pseudo-Australian restaurant.

Yes it really is called the “Corroboree Australian Bar and Restaurant”. I didn’t dare get any closer but if they are worth their name on the door then they probably serve Crocodile, Emu, Kangaroo, Ox, and a variety of other game, but it is probably more likely they will sell you a steak with Fosters.

Later in the evening I met up with my fellow mentors and bloggers and we headed out for some food.

Sitting at the table was Sig Rinde, Robin Carey, Gregor Wolf, Richard Hirsh, Raja, Dennis Howlett, David Terrar and myself. We were later joined by Oliver Kohl, Eddy DeClercq, Michael Krigsman, Thomas Otter and Phil Wainewright.

It is always a pleasure to sit down with these guys and if markets are conversations then these nights are priceless.

When I first knew that I would be flying out of London Heathrow Terminal 5 to SAPPHIRE, I was a little concerned. All I wanted was to get to Berlin but I had images of delays and cancellations which wasn’t helped last Thursday when popey was twittering about cancellations to most of the known universe. Yesterday morning however, I was early for an early flight and on arrival at T5 I used one of the self check in machines and was then through security in about 5 minutes. The only thing that I noticed that was not working was one of the large screen TV advertisements. It seems like they haven’t upgraded to Vista either! You will be pleased to know however that there were many many other advertisement screens working so Accenture had plenty of time and space to get their ‘Tiger’ message into my brain.

I would like to see the airport under strain as turning up for one of the first flights for the day is not a basis to cast a full report but so far I am one happy customer.

Working both in the worlds of SAP and PHP is very rewarding when you are able to have some influence on one world with the other. Joe Haynes, a basis[1] consultant whom I follow on twitter was asking the other day for recommendations on php frameworks. I immediately jumped in and recommended Zend Framework as I have recently started working with it and am very happy with it. I also pointed him in the direction of Paddy and Matthew who both have excellent information on their blogs. Better I might say than the official quick start from Zend.

Looking forward to hearing as update when your project gets going Joe, especially if you get some SAP integration going.

[1] a basis consultant, if you don’t know the secret technical SAP terms, is the guy who installs and monitors your servers