James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, discusses SAP TechEd 2024 in this quick take video.
This was a RedMonk video, sponsored by SAP.
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Transcript
James Governor
Hey, it’s James from RedMonk and today’s topic is SAP TechEd coming up October 8th and 9th. The question for me is why am I interested in content and why am going to be checking out those keynotes? The answer is pretty simple. So here’s the thing. As you know, RedMonk, James Governor, I’m all about developers, tracking what developers do, practitioner-driven tech adoption. So SAP, hang on a second, what’s the deal with them? Well, SAP, it’s the backend transaction systems. If you buy a can of Coke, if you buy a car.
If you buy a pair of Nike’s then that transaction is going to be happening in SAP enterprise resource planning. This makes it the backbone of you know, a huge amount of what we do on a daily basis. Now, you know, we talk a lot in the industry at the moment about the zero interest rate phenomenon, a lot of tech build out, know, perhaps sprawl. We were spending stuff and stuff was getting funded that wasn’t going to pay the bills. Well, SAP is all about paying the bills and it’s definitely not a zero interest rate phenomenon.
Another thing, so SAP is, if I’m about developers, why am I interested in those transaction systems? Well, here’s the truth. I have known SAP for years and it turns out they have a pretty rich hacker culture. They spend a lot of money and pay a lot of attention to developers and they do have a builder culture there. Now, what you generally see is that front end, it’s a sales driven, you know, classic enterprise application business.
But there’s definitely hacking going on. I met a guy called Craig Cmehil many years ago, and that was when the light bulb moment happened for me. So he was touching their backend systems, classic ABAP code, that’s their proprietary programming language, building these applications, but he was building with a scripting language. And the fact that there was somebody there and he was like, hang on a second, James, let me show you this. And he was showing me coding environments that made perfect sense to me, but he was programming SAP. It was like the lights switched on.
They started inviting me to events, met a lot of the people that were in that ecosystem. And yeah, it became pretty clear that there was a build culture there. And that’s one of the things I’ve tracked over the years. So what about TechEd in 2024? OK, here’s the thing. It’s 2024, as I say. So what is there going to be? A lot of AI. You’re not going to go to an industry event without there being a strong AI component these days. And TechEd will be no exception.
So I’m interested in finding out a little bit more about their AI core and their co-pilot, it’s called Joule. So how are you gonna be building AI powered applications using LLMs that touch those back ends? I’d be really interested in like, what might be some of the security implications of doing so? So yeah, definitely catching up in terms of AI, catching up in terms of their data story, that’s always interesting. Because here are the things that basically define what we do in terms of building automation, integration.
And at the moment, as I say, AI, this is a chance to find out about all those things, how they touch those SAP backends, how they touch those systems, what it’s doing in terms of CRM, what it’s doing at some of the backends. But definitely, as I say, I’m listening to that developer story. So for me, I’m going to be paying most attention to the developer keynote. They call it Deconstructed. So they’re going to be taking the business level keynote and the SAP developer advocates will be deconstructing that.
doing some demos and that’s really what I’m most interested in. So yeah, the SAP popped up. They’re like, hey James, we’d love it if you checked out the event. I said, sure. Okay, why not? And then they said, hey, and we’d like to sponsor you to make a video about that. I’m like, well, okay then. So here is a sponsored video. I will be there checking out the keynote and what their developer advocates have to say on the eighth and ninth. And I mean, yeah, really if you’re interested in software development that is not a zero interest rate phenomenon, you might think about joining me.
