Have you ever wondered what the SAP teams upstairs are working on? - Our location in Newport Beach is not only home to HanaHaus but also to the SAP Innovation Center Network. The SAP teams are working on topics such as ambient voice technology, AI-driven development, explainable AI, data labeling, and data anonymization. On Friday, SAP celebrated the official launch of its Newport Beach office and held a grand opening celebration.
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For its Newport Beach Grand Opening, SAP welcomed several leaders participating in the ribbon cutting ceremony, including SAP Co-Founder and Chairman, Hasso Plattner, SAP Chief Operating Officer and Executive Board member, Christian Klein, and SAP Chief Innovation Officer, Max Wessel. Additionally, Newport Beach Mayor, Diane Dixon, and CEO of the Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce, Steven Rosansky, took to the stage to formally welcome SAP to the business community.
Hasso Plattner encouraged the audience to stay curious and to raise your voice when you see room for improvement. That’s how things can be changed.
As Co-Founder of SAP and Chairman of its Supervisory Board, Hasso Plattner knows the importance of innovation to keep ahead of competition and to bring superior value to customers. However, the big question is: How to stay innovative and keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive?
For him, this location in Newport Beach is all about spirit: "The young ones we hire here trust in themselves”. In his speech he emphasized how important it is to be critical, to fight against routines, and to be strong enough to speak up when you see an opportunity.
The reason why he suggested to open a new Innovation Center in Newport Beach is the strong density of universities in interesting fields such as health care, machine learning, or artificial intelligence - especially within the School of Information & Computer Sciences at UC Irvine.
Lisa Schrumpf, Andreas Thurner, Prof. Marios Papaefthymiou, and Shelley Iocona talked about current trends within the Orange County innovation ecosystem.
Lisa Schrumpf, Chief Operations Officer for the West Market Unit at SAP, moderated a panel discussion that provided a few different perspectives on SAP’s important presence in Southern California that is already helping build a strong community of innovation and entrepreneurship. Panelists included a local SAP customer, Karma Automotive; the dean of Information & Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine; and a local startup advisor from ON ITS AXIS who frequently uses HanaHaus to conduct business with the entrepreneurial community in Southern California.
Steve Rosansky, CEO of the Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce, thanked Max Wessel and Julia Schlier for bringing business and innovation to Newport Beach.
SAP and HanaHaus received multiple recognitions from the Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce, the City of Newport Beach and several legislations.
On the second floor, attendees experienced demos of innovations coming out of both the SAP S/4HANA Eureka team at that location and the new SAP Innovation Center.
While September 6 marked the formal opening of the location, the Southern California colleagues have already been hard at work in the space for several months. Under the leadership of Hans-Martin Will, who previously led the development of AI systems for Amazon Alexa, a new engineering team is working on solving some of the toughest problems in enterprise AI, building on the experience of our central machine learning organization at SAP. Read more about the Innovation Center.
Participants discussed the areas of application of invisible intelligent assistants and how they can help managers to be more effective in a meeting.
One demo covered the question how ambient voice technology can make meetings more effective. The team found out that managers spend a majority of their time (around 50%) in meetings. When being in a meeting taking notes uses a big part of their brain capacity and prevents them from fully concentrating on their conversation partner.
To help managers using their time in meetings more efficiently, the team works on new use cases for ambient voice technology. Their approach is to use automated speed recognition and natural language processing to capture important notes and actions from a conversation. By creating automated meeting transcripts with all relevant action items, dates, and names their service could help managers to focus on the conversation.
Please meet the SAP Innovation Center and the S/4 HANA Eureka team - they are looking forward to meeting you!
The goal of HanaHaus is bringing people together and enabling meaningful interactions. With the location in Newport Beach, we invite the community to explore the latest trends in technology with the SAP Innovation Center and the S/4 HANA Eureka team.
If you are interested in topics these teams are working on, please feel free to let our HanaHaus ambassadors know and we are happy to connect you with the teams upstairs.
Please have a look at the graphic recording of the opening celebration.