We had another very successful TechEd this year at the Bangalore International Exhibition Center on November 2^nd and 3^rd. It was great to see many energetic faces in-person at the first post-pandemic SAP TechEd in APJ.  In this blog, I would like to focus on the Data & Analytics track, one of the six technology tracks at SAP TechEd this year.  There were more than 500 sessions for the participants with both SAP speakers and external ones flying in from all over the world.

SAP CTO Juergen Mueller’s opening keynote set the stage for an event packed with insights and ground-breaking announcements.  The executive keynote offered a glimpse of SAP’s latest innovations and it was no surprise that generative AI capabilities across its product portfolio was prominently featured. Attendees witnessed product demonstrations and real-world stories from SAP partners and customers, highlighting the practical applications and impact of SAP’s innovations.

There were more than a handful of announcements by Juergen & team during the keynote. First up was SAP Build Code, a new pro-code offering designed for developers using Java and JavaScript on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) was unveiled at the event. For more details about the announcements, visit the SAP TechEd news-guide. Participants were overwhelmed with content with different session formats and lots of learning during the in-person event in addition to the ones offered on the SAP TechEd Virtual event.  A significant number of customers and partners made appearances during Juergen’s keynote as well, which highlighted the large presence of external speakers at this technological event.

The data enthusiasts had a fair share of announcements to digest as well:

• Juergen announced SAP HANA Cloud was set to receive vector database capabilities to manage unstructured data, such as text, images, and audio, as vector embeddings.

• A Semantic Onboarding feature was announced for SAP Datasphere, which preserves data semantics during the onboarding process, eliminating the need for time-consuming data reconstruction.

• SAP Analytics Cloud added a Lightweight Viewer, delivering significant performance improvements compared to the classical SAP Analytics Cloud stack.

Many sessions in the Data and Analytics track witnessed a high level of attendance, with a few sessions having participants willing to stand as seats ran out in the session halls.  Among the standout sessions was a highly sought-after lecture providing an in-depth look at SAP Datasphere. This particular session enlightened attendees on the foundational role SAP Datasphere plays in building a business data fabric.  Other popular lecture sessions included Strategy & Innovations on SAP Analytics Cloud, Roadmap sessions across Data & Analytics, as well as a couple of sessions that dealt with building applications on SAP HANA Cloud.

SAP Datasphere was a popular topic amongst attendees, and quite a few in the audience had queries about how it compared to SAP Data Intelligence and functionality overlap with solutions in SAP’s Data Management portfolio.  There were plenty of mini-theater sessions and 25+ demo sessions to choose from.  More than a handful of customer and partner sessions were on offer – something that the audience seemed to appreciate as well. More than 10 hands-on workshops were offered in this track, most of them fully booked, as attendees were able to complete exercises with product experts being available to help them as necessary.

Overall, the couple of days proved to be both busy and fruitful for a majority of the  5000+ participants at SAP TechEd Bangalore. The in-person attendance was notably high, and I have no doubt that the virtual event was equally successful.  You can still catch up on some of the action you may have missed by visiting the SAP TechEd website.  The Developer Keynote and Business Application Keynotes were also quite impressive.  Do check them out via social media and the Virtual Event site.

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