SAP TechEd 2015; Talking Enterprise Architecture in the Desert

Last week about 6, 000 developers, architects, integrators and system administrators descended on the Venetian resort in Las Vegas for SAP TechEd 2015. The common thread that tied them together was SAP technology, whether they use it as current or prospective customers, or add value to the SAP stack as ecosystem partners.

The agenda was full of updates from SAP on product direction, best practices, and case studies. Wednesday night was DemoJam, an on-site contest in which developers quickly built a healthcare solution based on a fixed set of criteria, and Saturday night featured a rockin’ concert by Third Eye Blind.

We were there to talk about an alliance with SAP that we announced in July; namely their selection of Solace technology for use within the SAP HANA® Cloud Platform as a means of moving information between their core cloud datacenters. This means that HANA Cloud Platform customers will be indirectly using Solace as well, in addition to the many SAP customers already using Solace technology to keep real-time information flowing between SAP and other applications within their datacenters and in the cloud. Our integration with Spark also means they can use HANA Vora to accelerate queries with HDFS and HANA so they can perform real-time analytics on incoming data.

In our booth we showed off a connected car application that was monitoring several (simulated) vehicles driving around Las Vegas and people walking around the show floor, all via a mobile app. All of the IoT location data and video from the mobile app was routed via Solace from Vegas to London and back through the Solace Virtual Message Router and onto the console. This demo was a mashup of two proof of concepts we did for customers, one around logistics tracking, and one around video security.

Most of the attendees we talked to were pretty enthusiastic about their time at SAP TechEd. There were people from virtually every industry, and from around the world. SAP is doing a lot of innovation around big data, cloud, IoT and analytics which are still relatively emerging concepts for many of their customers and partners, and we’re excited about the role our technology can play as customers aim to take advantage of that innovation.