Inspiration, Passion, Humanity, and Innovation at SAP Ariba Live Barcelona

Inspiration!

We all seek inspiration in every thing we do, see and think. We experienced this @ SAP Ariba Live, Barcelona on personal and business fronts, all converging in three important things of our lifetime – Passion, Humanity, Goodness.

Team.

In her closing remarks, our CMO Tifenn Dano Kwan mentioned that it takes a village to organize such flawless events at scale! I cannot agree with this more. It was a fantastic show by SAP Ariba’s Marketing team and all others who pulled this spectacular event off and helped us to be engaged, inspired and entertained.

Do good.

Going through any human rights violation is a terrible, terrible thing to happen for any human being. Equally hard is hearing victim's stories and living with them, and more so hard is trying to instill the positivity in the battered souls and helping them get justice. This requires a tremendous amount of compassion and dedication. Amal Clooney is doing this incredible work for years and has dedicated her life for this. She not only got us awestruck with her work and charm but also inspired us all to do good in any small way possible. If not for anything, but for us to be better selves the next day and every day possible and impact other humans on a positive side.

For Businesses, her words summed up “if doing good is profitable, then doing good can be sustainable”.

 Ethical Technology.

Can Technology be Emotionally Intelligent?

But, why?!

In the next 30 minutes, Rana el Kaliouby not only answered that question but mesmerized 2000 listeners with her demonstration and #passion on how affective / Emotion AI can be used for the betterment of humanity. She took us through the wide spectrum of applications for Emotional AI across personal life and businesses. With technology playing a major role in most critical disciplines of our lives – education, health, work, autonomous transportation – it is important for it to become empathetic to the users – students, patients, professionals, etc.…. In the world where we hear stories about Intelligent Technologies being used more and more towards surveillance and human rights violations, Rana inspired us with a fresh dose of hope and a dimension of how tech can be used in ethical ways to improve the world.

She closed the day with this statement “Let us make Artificial Intelligence not about the artificial but about our human needs”. For Technologists in the room, this statement resonated well.

 Passion.

Then came a small, beautiful performance on the stage on Day 3 - a violinist, 2 dance performers, 3 guitarists, and a pianist. It was great music, wonderful dancing, and overall a great short performance.

After the performance, the pianist started addressing the crowd. He said there are two passions for him in life - Procurement and Music. And we wondered why an artist is talking about procurement. Then he introduced himself - it was our COO James Lee! While we know James is our COO, not many of us have seen him. But now we know and how! He is not only our COO but a trained, concert pianist.

How many of us can say we have passions in life that fires us up! Very #inspired by James’s passion for music and how he pursued it while growing to be a COO. It is important for all of us to have a passion and more importantly pursue them.

Here is an article about conducting business at tempo by James - https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2019/05/06/conducting-business-at-a-digital-tempo/

Innovation. Our Products.

You know what is Vital and #inspiring for any product team? It is knowing and seeing customers (consumers) use what we build. During SAP Ariba Live we witnessed this from our customers.

Asahi Breweries implemented SAP Ariba Contracts across Several Countries in European Region. It was such a fantastic experience to hear customers talk about how our product got implemented and the values delivered to that organization by our product. More so awesome is that session was intently listened by 60 other customers, some of who are #inspired by Asashi and SAP Ariba Contracts, to start or accelerate their adaption.

This is a testament to the innovations made in SAP Ariba Contracts product. Be it the new User Experience we built, which more than 60 customers pilot tested during the hands on lab at SAP Ariba Live or the Simplified Contracts adapted by numerous customers across the globe with in a month of its release to market or the interest shown by our customers on Intelligence Capabilities we are building in the Contracts Product as you read this or the new scalable microservices our architects has designed and built, the Team in India has taken this product to new heights with the end to end ownership.

Job is not done yet; we are just getting started.

Intelligent Enterprise and SAP Ariba Contracts.

As the Product Manager for the SAP Ariba Contracts I am excited about the role our product is playing in the Source-to-Pay Process in Intelligent Enterprise and Intelligent Spend Management Portfolio. Contracts will be the fulcrum for all Strategic Sourcing activities of a Procurement Organization. SAP Ariba Contracts will be the living document enforcing the Terms and Conditions, helping Strategic Buyers to talk to operational systems, maintain the sanity of the whole buying process etc... So I meant when I said earlier - we are only getting started!

Better Together. Better Tomorrow.

Overall, SAP Ariba Live demonstrated how SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass and SAP Concur have come together as Intelligent Spend Group to redefine the Spend Process of any organization and help the world Spend Better. There is a better tomorrow and we are making it together!

Goodness.

There are so many good things happening in the world around us! There are 3 Trillion Reasons to be inspired. All we need is to lift our head occasionally and look around and be inspired; We shall be inspired - to quote Debashis Banerjee - ‘for becoming a better self tomorrow than what we are today’