As tech-enthusiast and professional, I’ve always dreamed of being able to go to one of the huge developer-tech conferences that are held each year. And as a SAP enthusiast in particular, I’ve longed to be able to make it to SAP TechEd. Luckily, I was one of the folks who was chosen to receive a ticket. Thanks to Rojo Consultancy. Myself and fellow members of the team at Rojo journeyed to Barcelona, to participate in the SAP TechEd Conference 2017 last week. We embraced the opportunity to experience the futuristic technology that SAP had to showcase among thousands of other tech enthusiasts.
SAP TechEd was a huge event with nearly 900 individual lectures, demo’s, hands-on and Roadmap sessions spanning across three days. It was a lot of knowledge to grasp in a short time. It was extremely informative, interactive, and all-around educational.
Here, I’d like to share some of the highlights and announcements from this enormous gathering.
SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation
SAP announced an expansion of its SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation based on SAP Cloud Platform with three major capabilities: ready-to-use services, retrainable services and bring-your-own model. Additionally, SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation now allows customers and partners to tailor generic models with company-specific data. The new image classification service can be retrained to recognise customer-specific objects such as products, components or spare parts.
SAP and Google
As part of this strategic partnership, SAP and Google have proposed a data custodian model that will allow enterprises to continuously monitor risk and help with their data protection and access control policies. SAP HANA, SAP Data Migration Option, SAP Hybris, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) platform and SAP Business One are now supported in Google cloud platform.
ABAP on SAP cloud
ABAP in SAP Cloud Platform enables the ABAP developer community to step into the Cloud. ABAP in SAP Cloud Platform is SAP’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering for ABAP. ABAP has been the foundation for SAP’s on-premise solutions for many years. With ABAP in SAP Cloud Platform, ABAP developers can leverage their existing ABAP know-how to develop and run ABAP applications in the cloud. This pretty much guarantees that ABAP is not dead. It was exciting to see ABAP program running machine learning algorithms.
The concept of a conversational user interface (UI) is well established in the consumer world, with Alexa and Siri being the most well-known examples of intelligent digital assistants that can recogniSe voice commands to complete useful tasks, such as scheduling a meeting, turning up the thermostat, or playing music. But what is the potential impact of a digital assistant in the enterprise? For SAP, the answer to that question depends in large part on the reception of SAP Co-Pilot, a digital assistant for the enterprise that will be part of SAP Fiori launchpad as an optional component of SAP Fiori 2.0.
Overall SAP TechEd was the best experience that I’ve had involving technology. The ability to meet others in same technology domain, and those you admire from afar, is something truly incredible. I look forward to more of such events in the future!
Want to discover more about the power of SAP Leonardo IoT services? Join us for our webinar “Powering Enterprise: IoT and Supply Chain Management” next week by registering here.



