For me, SAP TechEd, Las Vegas has been packed with video shoots and meetings with development and marketing executives from SAP along with customers and partners. My feet are killing me and I long for a good night's sleep. Be that as it may, and I have said this before, but under the current leadership I get unparalleled access to senior people at the company.
Vishal Sikka, executive board member and the person driving SAP's flagship HANA development is among the most open and accessible people I know. He is unusual in that he 'gets' the fact that in his position, he is too far removed from day to day developers in the SAP ecosystem to have a good hand on the reality of what it is like operating and developing SAP systems.
The conversation was candid to the point of being painful but absolutely worth the time investment. I took the opportunity to shoot some of the session. The video includes selected highlights. If you want to understand something of the flavor of this most enigmatic of tech vendors then I encourage you to watch. For the rest, here's a precis:
As I reviewed the clips and thought back over the experiences of the week, it struck me that SAP is much more alive to the risks it faces than most people imagine. If SIkka is representative of the leadership - and I have no reason to think otherwise - then I get the sense SAP is a company coming to terms with the new reality of the 21st century.
As a side note, I was impressed with the fact that when colleagues brought major problems to the table, action was taken in the moment to get things fixed. That has never occurred before. And for the first time, I met a series of highly placed individuals who are not only thinking differently to the way I expected but have real plans in place against which to execute.
We left SAP with a laundry list of issues. The next stop in the TechEd tour is Madrid. I'll be checking progress with keen interest and looking to gain more insights into what makes this company tick.
Image courtesy of Martin Gillet
Disclosure: SAP covered most of my travel and expenses to attend the event.