The scenes and stories from SAP’s Sapphire Now 2015

Sapphire Now, along with Oracle Openworld and Salesforce’s Dreamforce, has become one of the major enterprise application gatherings in the world, with past sessions lead by customers such as Canada Post and others.

SAP CEO Bill McDermott’s keynote was all about the software maker’s efforts to extend the reach of SAP HANA further into the realm of non-technical users. He focused on making the high-end technology more simple — a word he used so much it started to attract attention on Twitter.

Like most other vendors, SAP is trying to demonstrate leadership in the emerging “Internet of Things,” and the latest version of HANA is intended to ease the transition to a world of connected devices and sensors. This includes managing devices, messaging, enabling applications, data modelling and other features.

An example of the Internet of Things made manifest at SAPPHIRE Now was the Experience Zone, an octagonal room featuring 16 screens telling four different customers stories. The experience begins with questions about how to simplify business that are later answered in the keynotes and can be experienced through scenarios running in the interactive panel at the heart of the zone. Nine miles of fiber optic cables run up to the ceiling and over the catwalk into a crowded space backstage where the team is operating the Experience Zone.

Other attempts to showcase how SAP is embracing the IoT include updates to Lumira, which offered an array of data visualization capabilities that would appeal to non-data scientists.

SAP co-founder and chairman Hasso Plattner’s keynote speech had a title that could sum up many CIOs’ strategic obsessions: “Speed that drives innovation.”

Though SAP executives were obviously in the spotlight at the show, the company emphasized the role of its partners such as Siemens and Intel in helping to make its vision for HANA into a reality.

It wasn’t a major discussion point at Sapphire, but just as the event was winding down research was published suggesting 95 percent of SAP installations are vulnerable to security issues. Maybe offering a counter-argument — and some ideas for better safeguarding data and access — will be a major theme of next year’s conference.