At SAPPHIRE NOW

This week as part of the SAP Media and Analyst program, I have been invited to SAPPHIRE NOW

Blogger tagSAPPHIRE NOW is SAP’s annual conference for introducing new products and making new announcements.

As part of the event there are three major keynotes:

  • Bill McDermott on Tuesday 5 May
  • Bernd Leukert / Steve Singh on Wednesday 6 May
  • Hasso Plattner on Thursday 7 May

All these keynotes will be followed by a press briefing for the keynote speakers to be grilled by the press on their announcements.

I am particularly keen to see what they have on offer this year. It would be nice if the keynotes run to time but it seems like there is so much to say that they often run over.

I am looking for some clarity on S/4 HANA and what that bring to the table, how customers can get on the migration path and where the return on investment is coming from.

There will also be HCP or HANA Cloud Platform in the mix as this was brought to developers attention at the SAP TechEd && D-Code in October last year. I will be interested in how this story is progressing.

Aside from IoT (Internet of Things) announcements, I am keen to drill down on the WebIDE value proposition. As a SAPUI5 Developer I found some value in the local version of WebIDE and as Internet speeds in Australia can be challenging at times I found that the hosted version of the WebIDE was too slow to be a realistic proposition.

I hear from Yariv Zur, that it has improved and now can create simple screens from the oData metadata self describing document. Generated code can be tricky as it can restrict a developers thought process in modifying the code but if it is simple scaffolding I look forward to the timesaving head start that this could bring.

It is going to be a big couple of days so strap yourself in and hold on tight.