Last week I registered for SAP TechEd 2022, expecting some big announcements as the enterprise software giant celebrates its 50th anniversary.
The pioneers, the founders of SAP sat with the business experts of their clients fifty years ago to co-create ground-breaking solutions supporting the people and procedures that drive enterprises. Now, the brand-new low-code solution SAP Build upholds that legacy by enabling business professionals to directly influence the upcoming digital transformation.
The keynote started with the SAP Chief Technology Officer and Member of the Executive Board Juergen Mueller stating that “SAP Build brings together the world’s most powerful business applications with a platform that’s been designed to rapidly unleash business users’ expertise.”
Mueller also announced the biggest surprise of the event – SAP Build. A unified low-code offering built on SAP BTP that enables everyone to create & augment enterprise applications, automate processes, & design business sites with drag-and-drop simplicity! How cool is that?
With more than 200 system interfaces, SAP Build integrates with non-SAP applications. Access to business application data from SAP S/4HANA and other systems is simple and secure because SAP Build was developed by SAP. Professional programmers can package their SAP Business Application Studio code so that business users can use it to create in SAP Build. Additionally, IT may impose uniform governance and lifecycle management practises across all apps currently under development, giving the business confidence that all apps deployed by the company adhere to the essential security and governance standards.
It reminded of me what Julia White, chief marketing officer of SAP had said “Every company is now a technology company. There is not a single industry or [business] discipline that does not have technology at its core. That means we can’t just rely on a finite resource of professional developers. We need to find a new approach”.
While SAP is fully committed to empowering business professionals with SAP Build, it is also aware of the rising demand for the knowledge and abilities that only experienced developers can provide. Along with SAP Build, the business unveiled at SAP TechEd a number of learning initiatives to upskill existing IT employees and expand the pool of suitable candidates.
By tripling the amount of free learning available on the SAP Learning website, empowering underserved communities through technology, and collaborating with learning platform provider Coursera on a professional certificate programme to aid individuals in starting careers within the SAP ecosystem, SAP committed to upskilling 2 million developers globally by 2025.
I also loved how SAP, CTO Juergen Mueller showed his attendee badges from previous events and then said we are digitizing them for SAP TechEd. He then revealed that registered participants will be issued an NFT (non-fungible token) drop offering 15 pieces of digital art designed specifically for the event.
To make the sessions even more interactive, SAP created this NFT (non-fungible token) drop. The attendees could spot QR codes and short links in announcement windows that can be used to claim NFTs throughout live keynotes, online or in-person seminars, virtual lectures, and breakout sessions. The NFTs then could be transferred by attendees after the event to their personal digital wallets.
The 15 NFTs trace SAP’s path from a five-person startup in 1972 to a multinational enterprise with 110,000 employees in 2022. The NFTs from SAP TechEd cannot be sold or purchased.
Lastly, the way SAP is empowering, educating, and skilling the talent pool and the next generation of the IT industry is commendable. It is also to be noted that SAP has the 2nd largest R&D centre in the World here in India.
So do let us know what you think of the low-code platform, SAP Build aimed at giving the opportunity to millions of people who use SAP to develop and deploy themselves. Is it what the gloomy tech industry needed right now?
