Riding my bike, I save planet, save money and lose weight(got very less weight to lose).

Last Sunday I rode my bicycle for 30km. This wouldn’t be a big deal for a cyclist but for a bike rider like me it was. I crawled along on my way with the two wheeled tortoise from Hoodi circle to Koramangala to attend a community meet. I always dump my backpack with all the stuff that i would require for the day and place it into the wired basket hanging in front of the handle bar.

It takes me 20 minutes to travel nearly 7 kilometers to Marathahalli Junction, which if I drive would have taken me lesser than 10 minutes, if there was no traffic - and thats a big “if”. A year back, I used to drive when I used to have meetings away from the office so that I could get back soon, but when I came to know about Carbon Footprint I made many changes in my commutation style.

Now thinking about the Sunday trip, thirty kilometers, two hours and a few liters of sweat saved me probably 1 liter of petrol @ Rs 55/liter.

Why do I do this? Cuz its fun. Cuz, I know that I work all day and late in the night, so I don’t find time to exercise. And because now that I ride my bike often, I feel that I have done something good for the society  and myself. I feel sorry for the people who have problems in parking their vehicles at MG Road and Brigade Road on Sundays.

SAPPHIRE Berlin 2008 would start in a couple of days. SAPPHIRE is premier educational event that happens once in a year at Berlin.  A lot of senior executives, business managers, and decision-makers turn up every year. Thanks to SAP Labs, I got to watch the archives of all the sapphire webcasts that I had missed earlier.

Sapphire, Berlin 2008 starts on 19th of May. Since I’m working in a project at SAP Labs, I would not be able to make it. But again, since I work at SAP Labs, I would get the first hand information from my colleagues in German. You can have a quick look at the schedule at a glance. The three presentation that I would be interested in viewing

“Business Objects: Optimizing Business Performance” by Marge Breya & Sanjay Poonen.

“Getting Started with Business Intelligence” by Elie Kanaan.

“Introduction to the Innovations of SAP Business ByDesign” by Christoph Behrendt.

There are about 3 keynotes, 205 presentations, 146 demos, 81 Business objects user conference sessions and lots more that are exhibited during the three days. Its really difficult to choose as to which demos and which presentations to attend for which SAPPHIRE website provides the solution as to create your agenda. By this you can add all the events that you would like to attend and then this would let you know if there is a conflict in the timings of the events you are attending there by making life far more simpler.

As Sapphire event states:

Discover how today’s open technologies and business networks can help you achieve and maintain profitability, efficiency, and growth. SAPPHIRE is the place to learn from and network with SAP technical experts, customers, partners, and peers. Learn how to explore the potential of enterprise SOA, increase productivity, and manage the life cycle of your applications and system landscape in an end-to-end fashion

Looking forward for this event.

P.S. Please go through the floor plan before you attend this event.

This post is a continuation of the last post, esp. the point I missed in the briefing. I spent some time yesterday to view some podcasts and webcasts on SAP’s latest trend in Web 2.0, I was excited by the fact that SAP understands that it would have a huge impact on the enterprise software by the trends that are driving Web2.0 in consumer internet application.

I particularly liked the project SAP is working on, building prototypes in Second Life that are connected through sensors. The prototype in Second life is by itself the biggest idea to confirm that SAP was moving Web 2.0. These applications are fed directly by sensors, which means that there in no typing on the keyboard. You now find conducted by SAP in Second life. SAP now uses Second life for events, online training, demos, etc. For details, read Mario’s blog.

I also came through some projects by “Imagineering” team of SAP led by Denis Browne. SAP is into co-development with the customer innovators, who are invited to spend 6 months working directly with imagineering team. These customers report back to their company what they have learnt via blogs, wikis, webcasts and podcasts.

These truly are practical ways for enterprises to put new forms of collaboration to. work.

P.S you can find some pics of Second Life-SAP’s collection at Craig’s ablum.

This one has been lying my folders for quite a while now. It’s high time I set it free into the world of blogging! I feel like I’ve freed a caged bird.

I bet most people would regard SAP as an Enterprise 2.0 company. Even I felt the same until I attended a session by Saikiran on Production unit. Surely SAP is a huge and boring enterprise software company, if you were not an employee of SAP. Yet, even most of the employees of SAP don’t realize that SAP is a Web 2.0 inside Enterprise 2.0 and not Enterprise 2.0 alone.

What do I mean by Web 2.0 inside Enterprise 2.0? Well, its Democracy. According to Zeph:

“I see web 2.o and beyond as liberating consciousness and freeing one’s capacity to contribute. No longer is the model hierarchical. I think this is when enthusiasm, innovation, and collaboration become key drivers in the evolution of a company and society rather than rules. “

Getting back to how it is related to SAP. According to Saikiran(since I haven’t yet seen it personally) the strategy team believes in collective intelligence which I consider is the heart of Web 2.0. The session also helped me to develop the idea that even in enterprise context, setting defaults so that information is shared can lead to powerful network effect. SAP believes in reducing the second company’s repeat configurations by sharing the configuration directly with its first customer. SAP simply changes the default for what is public, SAP also believes in building applications that get better the more people use them.

SAP has also got its own internal social network called Harmony, which is the best example of Web 2.0.

Wonderful post on Trends in Business Intelligence, by Maloy Manna. An old one, but missed reading it before. There was a time (3-4 months ago), when I used to get excited everytime I came across a blogs which took up the topic Business Intelligence. Not that I don’t get excited now; but now, it’s become more common and somewhat find more people writing on it. If people made the mistake of asking me what I thought should they start from in order to understand BI, I would say this post. This post doesn’t give you an introduction about Business Intelligence, but it explains the evolution of Business Intelligence. This would serve as a base as to why most of the companies in India used BI more for a purpose other than decision making.

“1+1=1 is strange math” stated John Schwarz, CEO of Business object. But thats exactly how the market behaves.

This was the third keynote at Sapphire 2008, where-in he had one hour to explain how business objects fit into SAP and how the integration of SAP and BO would benefit the customers.

According to John, the integration of the leader in enterprise application and business intelligence would eventually lead to a creation of best possible way in execution and strategy.

Giving the commonly existing scenario John said that most of the organizations have a disconnect/barriers between decision making and executing them. Business Objects’ mission is to address these barriers. Business objects have brought to the table a portfolio stack that would optimize business performance.
John spoke about BusinessObjects XI 3.0, the business intelligence platform, which was designed for SAP and complements Netweaver. This allows information of any type(structured or unstructured) to be used data for business. With the help of a couple of demos, John illustrated the use of how Business Objects allowed the companies to look at the data it collected in a different way to get an in depth understanding of its business.

John concluded by saying:

“We are the only company in the market that can solve strategy automation and execution automation, and deliver the link between the two”. “Our promise in this brave world we have joined with SAP is to do nothing less than transform the way the world works by connecting people to information, by connecting business to its people and information, It is our bold promise that we live, breathe, and act on that promise every day – now in cooperation with our parent SAP. This transformation has helped to save lives, has made people happier in parks, has made us healthier, and will help your businesses run better.”

P.S. The whole presentation would be available at SAP website soon.

Day 1 of Sapphire 2008, Orlando was kicked off by Jujhar Singh on SAP CRM 2007 which was now available for over 300+ ramp-up customers.

Mike Burianek from Eclipse Aviation was the special guest who joined Jujhar on stage on giving his views about SAP CRM 2007.

Jujhar showcased three business scenarios and how easily they could be solved using SAP CRM 2007. His demonstrations featured the inclusion of business process embedded with new interactive. He also announced two new forums for CRM on BPX for web Channed and Interaction Center.

The Keynote on CRM 2007 ended with a live demo persentation on new CRM on Blackbery.

P.S. The entire presentation with be available in SAP website after the event is over.

Suggestive Reading:

CRM on Blackberry - Grefor Wolf(if you are a SDN member).

CRM BPX home page.

Demo clips on BPX.

Source: Volker’s Blog - Vice President of CRM Product Management at SAP.

Wednesday meetings are where we discuss the issues/concerns about the current project and make decisions as a team(Finance A1S, R&BI). We also have a session/presentation by a speaker from the team on optimizing work/domain knowledge share… For me, that was the first time I met the team(I mean, the offshore team). It’s fantastic to meet so many people from around India working in my team. I wasn’t aware of their names(except a couple of them), because I didn’t have enough time to study their background in advance(as in I didn’t look for them in the internal address book). There were Researcher(Panda)/bloggers(swetha)/IITians(Kamal kant)… I wasn’t aware of the topics they were discussing at the meet. But, All were full of passion and energy. I could feel from them how much they would like to work in the team.

After the meeting, I went to the Training session where I realized that I had missed the Finance session taken by Syamala. I didn’t understand anything for the next half an hour but found a couple of them around me who gave me company. To add to the list, we had an assessment test on the same day. The syllabus being the topics taken for the past three days. There were a lot of them who took the test seriously, but again we, the backbenchers had our own ways of doing it. Syamala helped us in lot of ways by giving hints as to where these questions came from. The moment the test got over, everyone had a holiday mood and didn’t want her to continue her session. She agreed for that on the condition that we go through it for 20 minutes and she would have a quiz. We just managed to escape the quiz and return to our guest houses provided by SAP Labs.

At the guest house, all my friends brought in different local news, we talked about all kinds of topics(projects, teams, etc), just like brothers. Everyone was excited to play snooker, so was I. We set out to the club house at 9pm and crashed to bed as mid-night.

I had a lot of friends coming over from different companies who have had training from the IT training companies(NIIT, Aptech, Enterprise logic, LearnSAP etc.) for SAP and trust me they are not half as good as the training I underwent for the past two days(Its in fact a three day course). But thanks to the myth that you need to get a hold of the technology before applying for a job. When you don’t get into product companies like SAP, Oracle, etc. they believe that its basically because of the fact that they have not undergone any courses on them, but then I realized that the only thing that most of the Training companies do is to teach you how to tackle loads of interview questions.

Day two of training at SAP Labs, India. Some slight tiredness but that is just due to me pushing myself a bit out of my limits on the search of a house near my office. I just realized I haven’t done anything so wearisome like this since I was in school athletic team where I forced way out of my limit. Though I didn’t have time to revise or even skim through what Syamala(Trainer at SAP for the course SAP01) had taught for the first day, I kind of remembered most of it. Thanks to her. Why? She was very patient with the silly doubts that most of us(Navneet, Uday and I) here did. She has a deep understanding on the concepts and she illustrated each of the concepts with a couple of examples. Guess, thats why they say experience counts.

I couldn’t attend the training completely, since my Project Manager had planned to give me a formal introduction to the team in Germany. During the course of the meeting I came to know that I along with Kamal Kant would be working under Marlene(in Germany). That was when I knew that I wouldn’t be attending the whole of my training, but just plug-in during the important sessions. The meeting was for about an hour, I returned back to the training.

I liked the Assignment that she assigned us during the end of the session today, which dealt with creation of a quotation ->sales order-> outbound delivery-> goods issue-> Invoice generation and the second one where we had to create Purchase receipt-> placement of order-> Invoice generation. These assignments literally covered up all the topics that we did. In fact the second assigment had some tweaks to done, which she didn’t cover purposefully, since she wanted us to explore the SAP Easy Access Menu. Hoping to stick with the herd till the training gets over.