Back from SAP TechED 2007

Last night I landed back in San Jose on US Airways 162 which should have been dubbed rather TechED flight. I am sure more than 50% folks were returning from Mandalay Bay. It was easily the biggest TechED so far with 6000 folks from all over the US, quite a few from outside US too. Attending the sessions you like and managing the schedule can be a lot of work – see right.

eSOA was the biggest theme this year and it was quite fun to participate in the Product Strategy workshops with Product Management folks. There were also quite a few sessions on Composition Environment. In fact Vishal Sikka’s keynote demoed some parts of the CE. Some of the other interesting things

ADoW – ADoW or Application Delivery over WAN was announced last year and it was good to hear that SAP is using it internally for their portal. It is a software appliance to speed up the delivery of NetWeaver Applications over the long haul WANs like between continents and long distances. It is achieved by caching and bandwidth shaping etc.

“New” Identity Management – is based on SAP’s new acquisition Maxware. This will be very useful and powerful tool in SAP’s portfolio. I can see this tool filling a lot of gaps I have seen on NetWeaver implementations. Virtual Directory Server (VDS) concept inside this tool is quite powerful. VDS can put a facade around most of the user stores like LDAP, DB, ABAP user stores. Right now this exists as a separate tool from NetWeaver. Hopefully SAP would be integrating this with NW pretty soon. 

Virtualization – is a recurrent theme which has been very hot in the last few years. VMWare and Intel were seen promoting this heavily and I attended a session on virtualization and Linux

SDN Clubhouse – Not a technical thing but IMO clubhouse was the most fun place to be between the sessions. Cappuccinos and Mochas were excellent. Met a lot of interesting folks over here. Good to see Craig Cmehil, Mario Herger, Irfan Khan and Kartik Iyengar. There were a lot of activities going on like SAP demos on the pods, community theater, 5 partner stalls with lots of ipod touches to give :), check your basis skills in the back etc.

Overall a fun and tiring TechEd. You can see a large collection of photos on Flickr. On Monday the first day I picked a lot of ribbons I associate with. Sticking them together and hanging under the badge would have made a nice necktie. But I chose to wear just the badge. Anyway here are the ribbons stuck together