Sunday at SAPTeched 2011 – It is all about Innojam

On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I took the first flight out of PHX to LAS to join fellow mentors and other SAP enthusiasts at SAPTeched.  I was happy to see people choosing to fly on this day – it sends a strong message to the world that Terrorism will NEVER win.

The day was all about Innojam , and Innojam is all about gamification this year. Mario started us with a good overview of what the concept is, and Sethu M did a good overview of SAP strategy.

I was part of last year’s innojam too, and its previous incarnation called process slam. SAP has listened to feedback, and there was marked improvement from previous years.  I would really like less PPT and lectures and more action in innojams, since the rest of the week is anyway PPT packed. We spent quite a bit of time this year too – although it was less than prior years. Next year, SAP should consider timing out people who make pitches that take more than 2 minutes or so. There were times when 50% of the room was just posting on twitter – including me – and not paying attention to what was going on in the room. Food looked better than last year, but some of us still ate from outside.

If there is one thing SAP should be shouting from rooftops – that is their Gateway offering. It is the most awesome innovation I have seen from SAP in a while, and more customers can use it than almost any other technology I can think of. I hope to see Vishal doing this in keynote, and not just talking about HANA.

We have more than 10 teams competing in innojam, and after the best dinner I had at Vegas – I got to be part of an innojam idea too. We are using HANA, BI 4.0, ABAP and Mobility to pull off gamification. And it has been nothing short of fun to say the least. The dinner conversation have to be left private for now – but I will definitely go out any  time with this gang. I don’t think I ever had a better night in Vegas ever. Please follow #sapteched for some fun twitter streams yestreday, and more for rest of the week.

There are 2 major activities for me  for Monday .

1. Attending Mobility deepdive

2. Finishing up innojam idea and presenting it at the final – thanks to a team of rockstars, this is a piece of cake.  If this team actually works on a real project together, Mike Krigsman will probably start blogging more on IT Success stories instead of failures 🙂

And finally – many thanks for SAP for inviting me to this event, and paying for registration and hotel.