Monday March 9 – Day 1
If you’ve never attended one of the SAPInsider conferences, I have one word to describe it: intense. I’ve been on the SAPInsider speaking circuit since 2011 and each show gets better and better. I just returned back to Atlanta from the BI2015 conference in Las Vegas and thought that I would share my personal experience on what attending one of these conferences can be like. As you will see, a LOT happens during the short 2 days that I was in Vegas but I’ll try to be concise.
Aside from booth duty with my company, Decision First Technologies, I delivered two sessions: Web Intelligence and Dashboards. These two sessions were also repeated due to the high demand so I effectively had 4 sessions. In addition, I was selected for the SAP Experts 1:1 session on Monday. I decided to fly in on Sunday evening since I was scheduled to test the Webi and Dashboards lab on Monday at 7am. On the way to the lab, I saw Bridget from SAPInsider and she personally checked me into the conference! I got in there at 7am and tested the servers. They were all perfectly configured and ready to go. Thanks Mike, Rey & team for the great work!
I then met my colleagues at a table near the registration booth and jumped on a client call to discuss the different visualization options and ways to streamline a demo to C suite executives. I walked down to the keynote hall and rejoined my colleagues. SAP’s new CTO Quentin Clark discussed everything that’s going on with SAP especially from the SAP HANA side of things. Jayne Landry then came on stage to announce SAP Lumira Edge edition! Adrian Westmoreland joined her on stage and gave a live demo! Those are always tricky on stage but he showed it flawlessly. I blogged about SAP Lumira Edge before the conference.
After the keynote, I went over to the Decision First booth. Another huge presence at the conference! If you’ve not visited, we had 4 pods: Welcome, SAP HANA, EIM and Analytics. You can move from pod to pod to learn more about the different technologies and get your hands on it. There’s a hangout space in the middle with a fantastic padded floor that’s a lifesaver after being on your feet all day.
I joined in on conversations around visualizations and the differentiations between the versions of Lumira Server. I would randomly hear “We have one of the authors here” when the Welcome pod was presenting our book “Implementing SAP HANA”. I enjoy talking about that creative process. Eric Vallo stopped over and chatted for a while. Afterwards, I walked around a bit (in search of a Diet Coke) and had a chat with APOS to discuss their latest offerings. Some great tools and functionalities are there!
Once I made it back to the booth, I had the great honor of meeting Jayne Landry from the morning’s keynote! We discussed my enthusiasm for Lumira Edge and ways that we are getting the word out to our clients. With stars in my eyes, I knew I had to eat before my 1:30 session started so I joined my colleagues for lunch where we discussed the new Predictive Analytics 2.0.
I made it to the hands on lab room around 1pm to test the servers (there were 40!) to ensure a smooth class. Everything was humming along and people starting coming in. We filled up very quickly and we even had a line down the hallway. I asked if anyone in the room would be willing to share and had a lot of hands. People were there to help others so we fit everyone into the room. We had a great session on Advanced Topics in Web Intelligence and I imparted my usual bad jokes and my advocacy of sap.com/learnbi.
Once the session was done, I went back to the booth for more conversation around Lumira, Lumira Edge and general reporting and dashboarding with a few demos in the Analytics pod.
That time went by very quickly and it was time to go back to the hands on lab to prepare for the Dashboarding session. Once again, flawless servers and a packed room. We discussed, among other things, the roadmap for Dashboards (Xcelsius) and whether what we were about to cover is unnecessary (It isn’t!). Typically we have folks in the room who have never used dashboards and some that have, so I geared my presentation towards both. We learned how to build dashboards as well as implementing advanced functionality in areas that include interactivity and advanced formatting.
Once the Dashboards session was complete, I had to RUN to the Exhibition Hall for the 6:30pm SAP Experts 1:1 sessions. There were folks already at the table including Mr. Don Loden who was there to discuss everything data services. My topics included all of the front end tools, architectures and configurations. I talked with various folks at the table regarding the decision making between SAP BI technologies vs Microsoft technologies, advanced architecture planning and pitfalls and migrations from older versions of SAP BusinessObjects to the newest version. There’s never any easy answers to questions like this but we find ways to discover options and determine courses of action.
Once the Experts session was over, I was really looking forward to a 7:30 client dinner at Tom Colicchio’s CRAFTSTEAK at MGM Grand. When I work with my clients, I try to understand their passion for what they do. When I provide my deliverables, I look forward to their responses on how it will help them in what they do. That is my payback. Because we get into discussions around such things, I tend to form personal interests in what they are doing and therefore love keeping in contact with the client. This was the case with my dinner companions. We discussed their plans for the future and ways that we can get questions answered. We discussed their past engagements and our families. We had a great bottle of wine and the 3 hours seemed to fly by.
I’m not much of a night owl nor am I a gambler, so I decided to go back to my room for the night. With my stomach full and my feet hurting, I recounted to myself what happened during the day. As you can see above, it was quite a bit. I went to bed.
Continue to Part 2.
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