With over 600 attendees for the regional meeting, a good % were from Latin America and the buzz at the conference was significantly different than that of a Sage event.
The focus of the conference was on innovation and how to increase penetration in to the market with industry specific targeting in the channel. As compared to prior years there were numerous partner success stories of how they grew their business significantly with a more targeted marketing approach and utilization of the new technologies provided by SAP.
The specific technology being pushed is the HANA in memory system and the analytics and new user experience it provides. From a user experience, enterprise search and workflow capabilities make the application work more like a smart phone than a complex ERP system, and of course the UI is now browser based.
The power of predictive analytics are being embedded in the ERP without additional calculation. MRP, customer ranking and churn probability are all real time in the upcoming release. The ""interactive analysis"" tool currently exports financial sales and service cubes to excel pivot tables and is being further enhanced to allow for saving of these cubes in defined reports with all the excel functionality utilized saved while maintaining the ability to utilize all the pivot table functionality. This new version will also include UDFs automatically in the cubes.
Finally the new mobile sales app based upon HANA has all the built in anlaytics plus now has caching for disconnected use and tight integration with iOS calendaring, phone and mapping functionality. Android and service modules due out later this year.
The point of this is that this is not your father's SAP, but a great SMB product with tons of investment and growth potential for any partner looking to expand their business both on premise and in the cloud. Please contact me if you have any interest in learning more.