Two weeks ago, I boarded a plane from Manchester to Berlin to visit the first SAP TechEd event to take place in Europe since the pandemic. The last in-person European TechEd was in Barcelona in 2018, shortly after S/4HANA was released, and it was great to be back – for the tech, but also for the people. Given the many challenges of the intervening seven years, it was a pleasure to return to seeing peers and colleagues in person at an SAP industry event that is more focused on Developers and Tech. EPI-USE Labs was a Gold Sponsor of the event, and we met valuable SAP Partners with whom we have collaborated over the years in data, privacy and transformation spaces; including BCS, KPMG, Tricentis, Deloitte, AWS and Microsoft. All the Partners had interesting things to say; and SAP themselves also ran a number of dev. garages, certifications on site and demo booths.
Two weeks ago, I boarded a plane from Manchester to Berlin to visit the first SAP TechEd event to take place in Europe since the pandemic. The last in-person European TechEd was in Barcelona in 2018, shortly after S/4HANA was released, and it was great to be back – for the tech, but also for the people.
Given the many challenges of the intervening seven years, it was a pleasure to return to seeing peers and colleagues in person at an SAP industry event that is more focused on Developers and tech than on license structures and a hard cloud and RISE push.
EPI-USE Labs was a Gold Sponsor of the event, and we met valuable SAP Partners with whom we have collaborated over the years in data, privacy and transformation spaces; including BCS, KPMG, Tricentis, Deloitte, AWS and Microsoft. All the Partners had interesting things to say; and SAP themselves also ran a number of dev. garages, certifications on site and demo booths.
This blog summarises selected highlights from three days in Berlin. As my focus in my professional life is data and technical transformation projects in the SAP world, my highlights veer this way, not covering breakdancing and the event catering!
© SAP TechEd, 2025
Travel and Day One: Monday 3, Tuesday 4 November
Landing in Berlin on Monday, it was noticeable how mild and sunny it was – a warm welcome back to in-person events! Unfortunately, the Berlin traffic immediately brought back to me the patience-testing parts of travelling to large events – I should have taken that early morning flight.
Tuesday morning arrived, and we made our way to the Messe Berlin – a giant round building reminiscent of a modern Colosseum with a roof, and a lot more hot coffee. Arriving at the event, we got the app installed (particularly well-designed this year). We set up at our booth, and then headed to the welcome event. It was packed, and out came Josh ‘Bluebeard’ Bentley (with his blue beard). Josh presented with a very dev-friendly charisma.
© SAP TechEd, 2025
Developers at the centre
What was noticeable was the immediate focus on Developers and customisation of IT systems to meet business needs. This is different from the recent Sapphire event that focused on clean core and public cloud – however the two aren’t entirely mutually exclusive. The idea is to move towards a clean core and to have all the customised processes you want, but built on new cloud-native and AI-infused technologies – on BTP or elsewhere. The current idea is that AI will play a heavy part in all your future business processes.
I’d have loved to see some sustainability or environmentally conscious messages in the opening, but that’s not what we were there for, and I suspect that given what everyone knows about power consumption and AI, it’s a topic that’s deliberately avoided for now.
This was a focus on ‘Developers at the centre’, and ensuring that people know that the AI and BTP journey is one to enable Developers, not replace them. Having tinkered with AI-generated coding, that certainly seems to be true to me for now. They immediately emphasised that Developers and AI agents should be in collaboration, not competition. Muhammad Alam (who leads the SAP Product and Engineering Board) came up and gave one of his first speeches. Foundation Models and Openness were a focus and ‘Connecting Data’ (oh hello) was a major topic, which kept me attentive, as I’ve spent most of my career in data-related spaces.
They held back the big announcements for a Keynote session to run at 16h00 CET to enable them to show-off and run a dual-live-cast keynote to both TechEd Berlin and TechConnect USA at the same time. Before that happened, I went off to network and join some sessions.
Cloud ALM Roadmap, CALM and AI
I first picked a Cloud ALM Roadmap event. Having had the pain in early professional life of working with Solution Manager, I was interested to learn about the Roadmap. They emphasised how CALM (can an acronym lower admin stress levels?) was a completely new development, never based in any way off SolMan. A reminder for readers – SAP Solution Manager maintenance ends on 31 December 2027 – so when you’re planning your S/4HANA estate journeys don’t forget that Solman also has a maintenance end date!
What’s interesting was the rapid shift in the presentation from actual ALM (day-to-day application lifecycle management) to CALM as their ‘Business Transformation Center (BTC)’. This was one of their themes – to start to wrap up a group of in-house and acquired technologies and show them as one simple ‘toolchain’ linked with CALM – the core of the toolchain being LeanIX, Signavio and WalkMe. So, Architecture, Business Process and business communications and training. A nice logical play – being a certified EA, I appreciated the structure.
© SAP TechEd, 2025
They then also mentioned Tricentis, and how it will integrate to help automate in testing – interesting I thought; especially as we’ve recently built a formal integration between our Data Sync Manager software and two testing automation solutions to provide data healing for testing (Worksoft and Tricentis).
There was the mandatory AI-spiel. They spoke about an AI vision for Cloud ALM and outlined ways to speed up detection, analysis and resolution. Autonomous ALM was envisaged. AI-generated test cases were touted. The ideas are strong, and the use cases seem nice. I cannot say anything demo’d showed anything that appeared likely to be immediately reliable, though, and my main question would not be viability in future; but rather cost versus reliability and value right now. Certainty there was missing – but the vision was interesting. I stepped out of the AI drum-banging for a while and got some lunch.
Enterprise Architecture and LeanIX
Then I moved on to an Enterprise Architecture session. It covered some nice features of LeanIX, but if you’re already an EA, I wouldn’t say that the digital replay is that interesting, unless you’re actively deciding what EA tools to use. The short summary is simply that LeanIX is an EA tool and has some nice features if you run a lot of SAP systems. Other EA software is also available.
Insider threats and security
I then went to an insider threats session run by someone who had experience with government security service agency processes. Interesting, but the presentation mostly stayed very general; they had nothing like the end-point, SOC, Splunk, ETD or Data Privacy/Security stuff we do at EPI-USE Labs and in our Group. Chase Kilburn was a good speaker; his ‘detect risk, correlate and act’ process held some interest. The ‘don’t upload sensitive data to AI’ bit was obvious; however, the session did then at least show the idea of embedding security controls in AI processes and that one point was interesting: their example using Llama Guard and putting security controls on an AI document translation (scramble certain fields when translating documents). So; Business process = Document translation; Security rule = always scramble address. An interesting view on security controls around AI processes.
Keynote: All about AI
Now it was time for the key note! The opening speech made remarks stating that people are bored of AI, that people still want to hear about AI, and then went on to make a keynote that rarely ever moved very far away from AI; though in a 'techy' kind of way. Part of the keynote was live between Berlin TechEd and USA TechConnect.
1: SAP-RPT-1 and SAP-ABAP-1
Embedding AI in smart ways is a huge focus and the big announcement was ‘SAP-RPT-1’ – an SAP trained model that’s core to AI 'being a teammate'. This SAP-specific trained model was a key announcement. This is positioned as the first AI foundation model for structured data in ERPs. This model is also known as 'RAPID 1'. It’s really worth noting that if you go to rpt.cloud.sap there are opportunities to have a play:
© SAP TechEd, 2025
They also covered a specific ABAP AI called 'SAP-ABAP-1' released in Q4 this year. This was noticeable for the huge applause it got from the audience. Vibe coding enterprise applications? It’s certainly coming but will the applications be better, or just cheaper to make…?
2: AI, Apps and data
A fly wheel of AI, Apps and Data was regularly shown. As a data company specialist, I was glad to see we still get airtime on the high level. There certainly is a move away from MRP, ERP or S/4HANA language, to this Apps, Data and AI focus.
© SAP TechEd, 2025
3: SAP BDC and the Snowflake
The SAP BDC and the Snowflake relationship was heavily focused on, and their play into AI and analytics is to offer clients a 'Context Rich Agentic Model'. Interesting for us in EPI-USE Labs, as we have a selective engine that can help automate the selective transition from historical BW and BW/4HANA system platforms.
Databricks is of course also still there in the mesh of integrated solutions they now suggest integrating as part of a BDC setup, but the newest Snowflake relationship was the key.
© SAP TechEd, 2025
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4: SAP HANA database
The SAP HANA database itself got keynote airtime – the database has increasingly got AI agents built-in to help users, and there was a lot of focus on database AI agent capabilities, native DB knowledge graph capabilities, and also agentic memory across HANA platforms. The image below shows the four core AI database agents: Discovery, Data, Multi-Model and Admin. You can also see a snap of the Joule HANA database agent ready to help you. This is likely to be of low to moderate quality for now, but DBAs will all be out there testing how to improve DB administration processes using this in the coming weeks and months.
© SAP TechEd, 2025
5: Data Security and Privacy
For those who are interested in all the security and sovereignty topics in AI and business currently, a space EPI-USE Labs is active in, SAP put heavy emphasis on 'AI for Europe', and there was mention of their efforts, backed by T-Systems, to have an specific European AI platform option for clients.
Did they demo? Well, it was canned obviously, but they ran through some quite snazzy usage of Joule – which can integrate with your preferred DevOps platforms – to build an application and to use Perplexity in the background to feed data into the application. Considering we’re in early AI days, you can see how fast development could become (if we don’t run out of planet, GPUs, cooling, etc.)
Day One wound us up in a Motel One with a takeaway and some day-job work into the evening. Tiring, but it was worth it; TechEd was back, and it was quite an interesting day.
Day Two: Wednesday 5 November
By day two, we’d heard all the headlines at TechEd; now we focused on workshops, sessions and networking.
SAP Business Transformation Centre (BTC)
I was focused on the SAP Business Transformation Centre (BTC) as EPI-USE Labs works in the transformation space, and has been testing BTC for usage alongside our own solutions.
Sascha, Alex, Daniel and Matthias (from SAP) held a hands-on workshop. We had two hours to run a Selective Data Transition (SDT) to S/4HANA in a pre-baked scenario. The analysis and blueprinting was very nice as I expected, having seen early releases before in Walldorf. The execution seemed good, though I was left with some questions about how some data models were or were not handled. EPI-USE Labs is a SAP BUILD partner who make one of the Complementary Partner Solutions software suites that complement this technology, and I’m impressed by their direction. Our solution is called 'PRISM', which has our software Data Sync Manager LT (Landscape Transformation), a Posting Engine and some other solutions at its heart, useful for SDT, M&A, SLO and DMLT scopes of work.
© SAP TechEd, 2025
What I’d call out as interesting is the Data Transition Validation (DTV) solution – it’s simple but very nice in principle. Migrate, validate. It could be useful in any kind of S/4HANA migration I believe.
I’d say that BTC is a good option for selective transitions that are not too complex. A CC slice with no transformations on data? Yes. A time-slice? I’m not sure about it yet. For EPI-USE Labs, we’ll be looking to use it where appropriate and to continue to use our technologies to complement what’s possible with it and without it. We’ll continue to focus on building the best options for people’s requirements.
The SAP team were very helpful, and will gladly share knowledge. I’d say SAP has picked a good group there and that BTC will continue to improve over time.
SAP HANA Cloud: The database for Business AI
After the BTC workshops I attended a SAP HANA Cloud 'The database for business AI!' session. It recapped the keynote of using AI within a database platform. I think it’s a grand idea to infuse AI directly at the database level – but I’d caution our clients to go slowly. I await the first news reports in The Register of AI agents deciding to 'take action' and causing problems in critical enterprise database systems.
Most of the rest of the day for me was networking conversations not to be shared here. But I did see the wonderful Pankaj Meshram – an age ago, we worked at HP together. He doesn’t seem to have aged at all! A Microsoft stalwart now, Seattle is lucky to have him. Good to see you, Pankaj!
Once again, dreams of a few pints of fine German beer are ruined by a busy schedule running into the evening, but the workshops today especially were worthwhile, and I heard the same from others too. SAP does these events regularly, and building workshops is a ton of work – they did a really good job.
Day Three: Thursday 6 November
The final day arrived. The sun continued unrelenting, and I was enjoying it. I have to say the event catering was almost perfect in its organisation. Food everywhere, which never ran out; always bite-size and easy to grab. The only issue was that too many sessions had limited space/capacity, while big halls sat with low usage (most were there for the sessions). A note to SAP – please twist that a bit – people want to be able to get into sessions after travelling so far! But … with good food and warm sun, who needs Barcelona? ;)
Digital blueprints and Developer empowerment
On this last day, I attended sessions showing how CloudALM is being positioned with the toolchain and BTC as a client’s transformation hub, including a 'transformation approach finder'. These are very nice ideas and I like where SAP is going with it. It makes SolMan look like it was developed by cavemen.
They say they already have 700 digital blueprints to inform its AI in this transformation approach finder. This will be a big part of IT transformation in future – using large AI models of any kind to consolidate all kinds of information and theory, as well as practical results evidence, to inform decisions. You can see how business can improve in general, and why the AI hunt continues despite serious stock market warnings. But I do wonder if aggregating a ton of data really leads to good decisions, or whether it’s more likely to lead to simply popular decisions.
The Sapphire theme of not pushing an 'S/4HANA' and maintenance end-dates message continues, and instead the AI and enablement of business remained the focus, with transition options being only a sub-stream of special interest groups there. Developer empowerment was much more the theme and – as an ex-developer – it was heartening to see this group of people give the odd earnest cheer to some of the AI tech SAP announced.
This event was really about Developers using SAP AI foundation models and convincing clients to use SAP technologies as your core technology-base for enterprise data handling, analytics and AI. To make SAP not just the backbone of all your core ERP business processes, but of all your business process developments too. Maybe they are a good option. Certainly they offer strong business focused technologies – whether that makes the technologies the best choice is less clear.
The new headlines
So we’ve shifted. Realtime? MRP? ERP? S/4HANA? No, those words are not the headlines anymore. Those are just some system names, databases and critical functions for which they have some highly robust out-of-the box options on their platform – ones where they assume to continue their dominance. Their focus now is to be a generic DATA, APPS, AI platform for any business process. This is summarised neatly by SAP’s movement towards this as a new logo which infers this movement. We might lose the blue geometric we all know so well yet, but this is certainly something they plastered everywhere and you’ll notice our friendly blue shape has been bumped out of the centre by a Jewel!
Which shapes do you think represent Data and Apps?
© SAP TechEd, 2025
When it was time to head back to Berlin airport, I was left thinking that the world shift since 2018 in Barcelona is stark. In that time, the world’s been rocked by a pandemic and war. AI has suddenly taken industry by storm.
For those not attending, I thoroughly recommend the next one to Devs, techies and those with a Dev, Data and Tech focus in their roles.
Lingering questions
I’m left with some questions on my mind:
- Will TechEd now be annually in person again in Europe for the foreseeable future?
- Did ChatGPT really just release in 2022, and what could be possible in seven more years of AI?
- It's ten years since S/4HANA was released; with this shift of sales message from SAP, how many people will be on a RISE contract and an S/4HANA system by 2035?
- AI remains a core part of IT lives. But can an AI-infused IT industry play a part in positive human progression?
Perhaps I’m hoping too much, and maybe that was the sunshine. As we left Berlin, the sun stayed out. SAP TechEd Berlin 2025 was a good return, and I hope the next seven years bring positive changes, but it would be good to be back in person again before 2032.
While making hopeful statements, I’ll add that I hope we’re 
heading not to lost jobs, but new jobs and less long evenings and weekends for people in IT or using IT. Maybe more time for people to be with their families. Perhaps the efficiency gains can not only fuel corporate profits, but also more efficient businesses that could, one hopes and dreams, contribute to improvements in the cost of living crisis. Because we come to TechEd for the Dev sessions and learnings; but we enjoy it and we do business because of the people.
Bis zum nächsten Mal!