Susecon: Why Virtual Customer Events Are Important

It should come as no surprise that many IT projects have ground to a halt because of COVID-19. However, planned projects may be delayed but not canceled entirely. Innovation and progress cannot be stopped. Modern technologies to optimize SAP IT operations or increase corporate efficiency already exist, and companies can use them to their advantage – if not right now, then certainly later.

Customers, partners and prospects in the SAP community want to know what’s happening, where technology trends are going, which existing partner solutions other SAP users have already implemented and how they benefitted them. SAP is at the core of many system landscapes, and customers need helpful information as well as demos to stay up to date. Even a global pandemic doesn’t change that – which makes virtual conferences, events and sessions crucial.

SAP and Suse both decided to move their respective events, Sapphire Now and Susecon, online. And it paid off – even though the technology didn’t always work flawlessly. Thousands of people attended Susecon, and tens of thousands attended SAP Sapphire Now Converge.

What Susecon has to offer

At Susecon Digital, there were 31 sessions about SAP, most of which can still be accessed on demand anytime. A lot of them talked about using Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications with Hana and Hana-based solutions like next-gen ERP S/4 Hana.

For example, there is a session on how dm-drogerie markt (chain of retail stores) migrated from IBM AIX (and Power) to Suse SLES for SAP as Hana operating system. There is another session on using S/4 with SLES and Nutanix HCI. Or – for those planning to leverage extended support for Business Suite 7 until 2027 or 2030 – there is a session on building and using a NetWeaver-based SAP solution in the AWS cloud with SLES for SAP.

Sessions on how you can use SLES for SAP in a hybrid IT environment with both on-premises and public cloud components are available on the Sapphire Now website, specifically on the Business Technology Platform channel which Suse sponsored. For example, there’s an interview with French SAP customer Engie who successfully uses SLES for SAP Applications both on prem and in a public cloud environment for Hana and S/4 projects.