Same location. Different universe. This week brought me back to Orlando for SAP’s annual Sapphire event for the America’s and this week it was all business.This is in contrast to last week’s COE event also in Orlando which was exclusively about product development.Let’s start off with SAP CEO Henning Kaggerman’s keynote on Tuesday that rolled out their new web based GUI.From an architecture perspective their NetWeaver SOA strategy is being extended to provide a flexible, extensible and web native application development and delivery platform.Very cool.And they even mustered an entertaining demo that showed off how multiple components of their overall technology set can be incorporated as extensible and dynamic widgets in the UI, which included a strong emphasis on integrating web-based Business Objects functionality.Also very cool.Some of the key points that Kaggerman made for SAP customers was that with this new approach would dramatically lower the overall total cost of ownership (TCO) and provide the ability to incrementally upgrade applications without having to upgrade entire systems.In many ways this seems like an obvious next step as it is consistent with what we see all see in mainstream SaaS services, but it is a significant development nonetheless.For the SAP partner ecosystem, it provides great opportunities as well.Right Hemisphere and CENIT have been delivering integrated solutions into the current thick client portal environment for some time now and the new approach will make it much easier to scale use-specific functionality across the larger SAP application environment much faster and at much lower cost for our customers.
I also sat through Hans Theilbauer’s presentation of their new PLM offering coming later this year that will be based on the new web GUI and it was very insightful.I’ve sat through a number of Hans’ presentations in the last year, but this is the first to roll out their new “Product and Service Leadership” solution category.It seems that SAP is positioning these categories as overlays to their existing silo’ed applications like “PLM”, “SRM”, “ERP” and so forth and aligning value around the benefit that their combined technologies can deliver.To back that up, Hans went through a series of examples that talked about “product invention, process innovation and product and service”.For example he talked about the ‘product invention’ of the piston powered propeller engine to facilitate powered flight, which is improved by ‘process innovation’ into the jet engine, and then ultimately migrates to ‘service’ which is reflected by GE’s shifting their business model by no longer selling product but charging only for usage. So what does this mean for their PLM product?Well, I’d interpret that as saying that the product will ultimately be tuned to the needs of the overall changing nature of the business of product to deliver cross-enterprise value in concert with other SAP-driven business processes.It also implies who the economic buyer is likely to be.Any large corporation’s investment in ERP and related business applications is a high multiple of what would have be spent on CAD tools and related systems.This business value positioning is a message targeted not only the VP of Engineering but equally to the CFO.So what about the product?In the short demo shown I can attest that they are leveraging the new web platform adeptly and are embedding CAD-sourced visual product data natively into multiple segments of the GUI across multiple toolsets that make up the solution. Overall it looked very clean, functional, and visually rich, which reflects a pragmatic approach to delivering rich data to drive PLM processes…but you’d expect a practical approach from SAP now wouldn’t you?We’ll keep an eye on this as this new product’s release will surely have an influence on the market.
Now I’d like to close my Sapphire summary on a lighter note.Having participated in countless corporate events like Sapphire over the years, you come to expect that there is some form of corporate entertainment.This year SAP really went big and pulled in an artist that you’d actually want to see…Eric Clapton! His show was awesome and the 15K+ plus Sapphire-goer’s (including myself) all had a great evening!All in all Sapphire 2008 was a class act.
In the immortal words of Julias Ceaser, “Veni Vidi Vici”
For those of you not fully brushed up on your Latin (myself included) that translates to, “We Came, We Saw, We Conquered”, which is how I’d characterize our excellent week out at the annual COE CATIA user event this week in Orlando, FL.Right Hemisphere’s booth was hopping at COE and had a really good buzz at the event.
First, let me introduce myself.I am Rix Kramlich and I am Right Hemisphere’s vice president of worldwide marketing and I plan to jump in here every once and while and provide insight into what we are seeing out there in the world at large.
So back to COE; In the last 6-12 months we have seen a huge interest in our solutions in the aerospace and defense market (A&D) and as you all may well know this is a market that relies heavily on the CATIA toolset.Many of our biggest customers made it to COE and we were impressed by the interest that we saw from all of the attendees there.Our speaking session was very well attended and we even hosted an after hours party with our partner CENIT (see the recent announcement).
Overall this year’s COE was very well attended and I’d say I saw about 1,000 + people in the keynote addresses on Monday, which interesting enough did not include a live appearance from Dassault CEO Bernard Charles.He sent a video-ed avatar in his place.Much of the rest of that keynote segment featured workflows relative to the upcoming v6 products which ended up taking about 50 minutes which was about 20 min too long and edged out most of the IBM speaker’s allotted 30 min of presentation time.Good keynote drama for sure.Net-net, though, is that the v6 demos focused heavily on how people would use and collaborate with CAD data for a wide variety of engineering focused and related downstream business purposes.Of course we have our own flavor of this story as does Adobe who was also attending COE.Certainly we’re seeing a critical mass evolving around this idea which is generating an overall awareness that solutions like Right Hemisphere’s exist for people looking for them in the market at large.
Our recent product announcements, customer wins and related good news was great for our presence at COE.We’re looking to go back big again next year when COE comes to Seattle!
Recently, I was struggling how to get dynamically loaded images to print in a Flex Report. I was using FlexReport (http://www.kemelyon.com/bts & http://flexreport.riaforge.org/) to handle the formatting, but couldn’t get the images to render before the Flex print rendering took over. While surfing around, I found a few classes (JPGEncoder and/or PNGEncoder) that you can use with the Loader class to load images. If you use Loader class in combination with an eventlistener you can create a custom itemRenderer that will ensure all your images get loaded before the print job starts.
Here is the source code for my ImageLoader itemRenderer which you can use in the PrintDataGrid:
My name is Mark Doberenz and I’ve been working at Right Hemisphere for almost four years now.
It feels like it’s been four minutes….. under water.
I’m a Senior Systems Engineer and I mostly work with our server technology Deep Server in a post-sales capacity, which mostly means I install and configure it at customer sites.
I’m also a huge fan of Adobe Flex/AIR and you’ll probably be seeing some posts from me about fun stuff I’m doing with Flex/AIR and our Deep Server API.
I also have a personal blog at monkeypatcher.com, so check that out if you want to see some other Flex/AIR related posts.
Well, I think that’s about it for this welcome post. Once again, thanks for coming, please come back soon and hopefully you’ll enjoy the information that will be posted here very soon.
