SAP TechEd Vienna ‘09 Demo Jam

It’s Demo Jam evening at SAP TechEd Vienna – a unique event often described as “American Idol for Geeks” – participants get six minutes to wow the crowd with their innovative solutions based on SAP technology.

Mark Yolton, head of community at SAP, kicked off the show with a great video of SAP’s sponsorship of the world 505 sailing championships, and thanked the SAP Mentors for their work throughout the year.

Then Demo Jam host Craig Cmehil took the stage to explain the rules (with musical percussion from a rock band installed beside the stage!) and introduced last year’s winner, Louenas Hamdi, who created AJAX Weaver AJAX composition platform.

Louenas gave a slightly stressed-out update of the solution (probably due to the intermittent internet connection problems that have plagued today’s event).

Next up was six minutes of “Gravity goodness” with Alexander Dreiling of SAP Research in Brisbane and Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon of Google Wave fame. An hour and twenty minutes of demo squeezed into less than six minutes! (see the real version — “the longest video anybody has ever watched on the internet”)

Alexis Naibo of the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center then took the stage to demo the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer ported to the iphone. Marge Breya thought the demo was so good that she already showed it as part of they keynote, but Alexis did a great job of analyzing the number of participants by number of PowerPoint slides – and announced that the application would shortly be available in the Apple iStore.

Sebastian Steinhauser and Tobias Queck of the Configit “No Hands” team used smart agents to give unlock a beer keg just by walking up to it…

Next, John Appleby and Michael Eldridge did a demo of a great mashup solution linking CRM, Xcelsius, the iPhone – and Twitter!

Then it was time for Alexander Dreiling to come back up on stage, this time with colleague Marek Kowalkiewicz to show off their Yowie prototype. It’s a sidebar application that automatically analyzes all the documents I’m working with, using SAP BusinessObjects Text Analytics to analyze all the “objects” that somebody is working with, and linked to standard web services such maps, SAP, etc.

The last demo of the night was Jesper Moller and Shahid Ayub, demonstrating a offline quoting mechanism for SAP ERP, showing some interactive designing of cool SAP t-shirts – including the second audience photo the day!

It came down to a nail-biting finish between Yowie, No-Hands, and the Explorer on iPhone – but after one final round of audience screaming, the winner was our very own Alexis Naibo of SAP BusinessObjects in Paris, who took home the first ever European Demo Jam Trophy – Congratulations!