Key take aways out of SAPPHIRE Orlando 2015

It's time to say goodbye to Orlando after SAP's SAPPHIRE event, with a week loaded of customer and partner meetings.

The technology related news were few:

   - SAP HANA productive support for scale-out on VMware is now on Controlled Availability

   - New servers based on the Intel Haswell CPU started to appear, promising increased performance per CPU core

But to be fair, and putting my self in the shoes of our customers, it was a very full week, with all the focus on:

   - what business outcomes can SAP HANA enable (S/4, Board room of the future, real time cash management, real time supply chain insight are just few of the many examples through the exhibition)

   - how the Internet of Things can impact business (integration of machine data into business decisions, HANA managing structured and unstructured data under a single pane of glass for better business insights)

But the highlight out of my meeting with customers and partners was an increased awareness and concern with:

   - understanding Data Temperatures in HANA as a way to reduce TCO when integrating massive volumes of unstructured data, and keeping infinitely the structured data generated by the organization

   - realization that implementing SAP HANA as an appliance might have been the only option in the past, and is definitely not the best, and so customers that have already been running HANA for some years, came all over wanting to understand better SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration as a way to reduce TCO and enable the leveraging of existing infrastructures and operational processes for less risk, as well all things about running SAP HANA on VMware as the simplest, cheapest and fastest way to start a SAP HANA project.

So, although the majority of SAP's talking points were targeted at C-level executives, the teams of these executives also came by and they were all about "how to make it happen in the simplest, most cost effective way".

For me personally, this was a massive event! I had an agenda so loaded with customer and partner meetings, and meet so many new faces in the community alongside with an increased interest on the topics I've written the most about, made this week exhausting, but very rewarding.

I' leaving with the strong feeling I've helped many organizations move forward with their SAP HANA adoption plans, by making it simple all things related with SAP HANA Infrastructure Integration.

Topics I would have liked to hear more about and that we're almost non-existent, were:

   - preview on SAP HANA SPS10

   - evolution of the Multi-tenant database containers feature

   - evolution of the Data Tiering feature

   - what is being done to make SAP applications running on top of HANA better for scale-out scenarios

   - more insights in to what is planned in regards to "HADOOP alike" capabilities coming to HANA, for example enabling HANA to natively access and process data available on HDFS stores without need for an HADOOP cluster in the middle.

Well, the plane is coming, and I need to run, but didn't wanted to leave without leaving my first impressions "hot off the press".

It was great meeting you all (customers, partners, SAP friends, SAP Mentors, company colleagues), thanks for all the interesting discussions, or just the fun moments, and looking forward to see you all soon!