Eye-opening exchanges at SAP TechEd / Las Vegas

Despite the oddly low ceiling in the exhibits hall this year, SAP TechEd rose to new heights for this attendee & sponsor.

The range of topics covered by the presenters, from HANA implementation strategies and success stories to product roadmaps to tools for developers was extensive and impressive.  And apparently some of SAP’s new tools were left in the bag as Oracle OpenWorld was being held the same week and SAP opted to announce some of their news at Barcelona in November instead.

We at SUSE had a fairly modest booth (choosing, wisely I believe, to spend larger sums on product development and customer support), but it was certainly busy.  Some observations from a number of conversations with our current customers, new prospects and partners:

• SAP is doing a lot of things right…the additional leeway being given for customers who will move to HANA as their data platform is largely acceptable to most of the people with whom we spoke.  2025 is far enough out to allow enterprises to plan and execute a deliberate strategy.
• The focus on HANA as an enabling technology for much more than Business Suite or S/4HANA seems to be enhancing its appeal. SAP Vora garnered lots of attention, as enterprises continue to map out what they’re going to do with all that IoT data. Our collaboration with the SAP HANA express edition team was well-received (SUSE Linux is the default OS for this developer-focused & free version of HANA).
• Our systems partners tell us that many of their customers are planning large-scale migrations.  One told us about a large 30-system HANA deployment – that’s hundreds of TBs –  that was about to close, and others disclosed similar news regarding their engagements.
• Our cloud system provider (CSP) partners had other encouraging news. They seem to be on the verge of a groundswell of SAP solution adoption in the public cloud environments that they engineer and offer.  Their customers and prospects seem eager to skip the cycle of architecting a complex set of gear, procuring it, integrating it and testing it for weeks and months before they deploy.  A fair number have already voted with their enterprise computing dollars, euros, pounds, yen and yuan.
• SUSE’s focus on “Zero Downtime” appears to be just the right message at just the right time – customers considering a next generation infrastructure either want to replicate the redundancy and failover strategies they’ve employed in the past on proprietary Unix systems – or take them a step further. SUSE’s support for a variety of failover scenarios, and our advances in the area of live kernel patching seem to be right on the mark.

If you had a chance to visit us in either Las Vegas or Bangalore, thank you.  If you haven’t yet, and you’ll be at SAP TechEd in Barcelona in November, please make it a point to see the SUSE booth and share your thoughts, challenge us with your systems/infrastructure questions, or simply drop by to say “Hello” (or “Hola!” or “Guten Tag”) and grab a green hat or a Geeko plushie.  By the way, our venerable Geeko mascot is actually a chameleon, I’ve been informed.