Looming large over every IT department is the challenge of business innovation: How do IT organizations enable and sustain it? How do you invest IT resources to cover day-to-day operations while providing the agility to address both planned and unplanned changes?

To support day-to-day operations and cope with rapid change, you'll need to follow an enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) roadmap, consolidate your systems and data, enable business process innovation, and leverage ecosystem solutions. SAP TechEd '06 will teach you how to do just that.

Ziv Carthy, SAP Vice President of Developer Programs, leads the team that has shaped this year's event. In this Q&A, he offers a preview of what the conference has to offer.

Ziv Carthy Vice President, Developer Programs, SAP

Q. What specific challenges will SAP TechEd '06 help attendees conquer?

Nowadays IT departments are expected to enable business agility. Every day, every week, every month, they are tasked with changes. The rate of change is rapid and will only accelerate with time. As I see it, the key challenge for IT today is to enable this business agility and innovation while continuing to operate the existing systems in a reliable, secure, and efficient way. At SAP TechEd '06, we show you how to do this. There is education on how to build innovation on top of the systems and processes you have, how to reduce the complexity you now encounter when trying to innovate, and how to reduce your integration, maintenance, and development costs.

The number-one challenge for CIOs today is extracting resources that are tied up in running day-to-day operations so that they can be invested in differentiating, innovative measures. What we've done with SAP NetWeaver is build a comprehensive integration and composition technology stack coupled with a rich set of reusable enterprise services. How does this help IT organizations combat the challenge of resource constraints — the very thing that stymies innovation? It removes complexity and cost. With one scalable platform, it is much easier to develop, integrate, and operate your processes. With reusable services and composition tools, you can readily build on what you have and extend, modify, and recompose elements simply by modeling the processes rather than coding them. You can easily add new solutions, and these solutions can come from SAP or the broader SAP ecosystem.

At SAP TechEd '06, we will not only show you how you can develop, integrate, and optimize applications, we will also delve into the strategic blueprint you should use to guide these efforts, namely enterprise SOA. You will learn how all the moving parts work, how they interact, and where this vision of enterprise SOA and the business process platform (BPP) is headed.

In total, attendees can choose from over 800 hours of sessions and hands-on training. We offer a very deep, comprehensive body of knowledge that is relevant for all IT practices that enable IT agility and business process innovation. Moreover, it is education designed to empower the attendee to take advantage of our technology and, in turn, make a demonstrative impact across their organization.

This is a venue that offers attendees career and professional development. I encourage everyone to be there.

Q. For returning attendees, what are you bringing back this year, and what are you adding? And what can new attendees expect from their SAP TechEd '06 experience?

Attendees will certainly find extensive coverage of the SAP NetWeaver platform. Content at this year's event is aligned with IT scenarios and practices — data unification, end-to-end process integration, and user productivity enablement, to name a few (see www.sapteched.com for the complete list of event tracks).

One thing that I'm particularly excited about is the track devoted to enterprise SOA. If you've already started down this path, SAP TechEd '06 will show you how to capitalize on this architecture. If you haven't yet started or if you're new to the concept, you will have ample opportunity to shore up your knowledge in this area and learn how to migrate from your current technology base to the newer SAP technology base, all while still taking advantage of your existing infrastructure.

In the past, much of the education at SAP TechEd was led by SAP and centered exclusively around SAP technology. This is no longer the case. With SAP's strong emphasis on co-innovation driven by a thriving ecosystem, SAP TechEd '06 is characterized by exceptionally visible community participation. Attendees will find many SDN-, partner-, and (for the US event) ASUG-led sessions. Ecosystem innovation will also enrich our famous Demo Jam and the SDN Clubhouse (see sidebar "Event Highlights"). And brand new this year are special tracks for business process experts and enterprise architects.

SAP TechEd is an event that must not be missed. The excitement is palpable. New and returning attendees alike will find an energy flowing throughout the event that will take hold and stay with them for a long time afterward.