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 her 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!

The show opened with the obligatory high-production-value-video that faded out to a oh-so-sustainable image of a man walking his dog in a field of wind turbines.

Then Mark Yolton, the head of SAP’s Community Network, opened the show with a reminder that the success of SAP is due to the extended SAP community, and thanked Zia Yusuf for his work as head of the Global Ecosystem and Partner group over the last ten years.

Jim thanked the audience for turning up in such large numbers to celebrate his birthday, and took a photo “to show my friends on Facebook what a real birthday party looks like”.

His presentation covered the accelerating change of the modern technology world, mentioning in passing that the phenomenal success of Apple’s iTunes relies on SAP systems to look after the amazing 10,5 million downloaded apps per day.

Jim talked about the need to innovate at different time-scales, with the ability to combine the best of new techniques with a stable, efficient core — what SAP CTO Vishal Sikka calls “timeless software”.

He went over innovations in the core SAP applications, included a clear swipe at Oracle’s CA-like collection of purchased applications, noting that his infant son had proved that popular toys like Lego and Playmobile can indeed fit together – if you have enough glue.

He talked about SAP’s on-demand strategy and introduced Marge Breya of SAP BusinessObjects as somebody passionate about “software for people”. Marge kicked off with contrasting the personal world – where anybody with an internet connection can access pretty much all the information they need – with the corporate world, where the majority of executives struggle to access the data they need for effective decisions.

Marge invited on stage Nayaki Nayyar, enterprise architect of Valero Energy Corporation, a $120bn+ refining company. Nayaki explained that their IT costs were a miniscule 0.11% of revenue, approximately 10 times less than the industry standard, thanks to their approach to reusable information services and self-service access to information.

As an example, she talked about Valero’s real-time refinery operations dashboard, which resulted in projected savings $5-15m per refinery, or$200 million dollars across the company, simply through better energy information. As Nayaki put it:

“Simply bringing the right information to the right decision makers made all the difference”

Nayaki then demonstrated Valero’s collaborative internal portal, using SAP NetWeaver technology, which allows employees to easily drag and drop information modules into their personal workspaces, combining both structured and unstructured information. She explained:

“When the collaborative portal was first showed to the CEO, without mentioning the underlying technology, his reaction was ‘I wish SAP was this good looking and easy to use!’”

The demo included the creation of a collaborative discussion around a refinery operations dashboard that brought together information from sixteen different refineries.

Marge came back on stage to talk about integration and innovation across the SAP BusinessObjects suite of products, and demonstrated a typical information workflow, including:

Collaborative decisions, using a new product from the labs

Information sharing, with a sneak peek of the company’s next-generation on-demand business intelligence

Information integration, using Data Services

Information analysis, using some new features of the Explorer product

Explorer as an iphone application from the labs (featuring Joe King and a huge mug of beer)

Xcelsius dashboards built directly on Business Warehouse BEx cubes, using BI Consumer Services

BPM and master data management

The final demo of the keynote came from the infamous Ian Kimbell, who had some fun with power tools, showing an aviation maintenance application using automatic sensors – as he took tools around the factory workspace, they were automatically tracked by the SAP system.

Jim closed the keynote with a discussion of column databases and in-memory processing, how it can change systems in the future, and the progress SAP has made in this area.