Event in India with former president APJ Kalam – 4000 employees onsite + TV audience

This Friday was a special day for our employess in India. At the SAP’s Leadership Talk Series, organized by V R Ferose, managing director, SAP Labs India, former Inidan president Kalam held forth for 45 minutes in a thought-provoking and motivational speech. The session was opened by board member and CTO Vishal Sikka with an address to the Indian employees.

See some behind the scenes comments and videos of the prodction….

The internal event was one of the largest all hands meetings in India so far. Over 4000 employees were attending onsite.

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I also tried to capture some video footage of the moment, when former Indian president APJ Kalam arrived at the venue. Unfortunatelly my new camera had some problems with the autofocus, but I thought this moment might be interesting as well for you. Please apologize, that the video is not really sharp at the beginning, but I meant to include it into this thread:

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In addition many colleagues were watching the event online. It was broadcasted live throughout India via SAP TV. When I was getting back to the office to pay for my driver, I had the chance to capture some video footage in the office as well with my blackberry.

(I will add this video as soon as I can connect my blackberry again)

SAP had to use its over one hundred busses (all operated by SAP), to get the employees safely from the campus to the event hall. There was the need of switching away from the SAP facilities, as the event rooms in the SAP Labs building could not host a live audience of 4000 people. Just as an additional inside: SAP runs 150 taxis with drivers for the SAP labs in India….

Since SAP also has offices in Mumbai, Delhi and other locations in India, SAP TV had to offer additional streaming. For that the team had to bring in four cameras and a bunch of technical equipment, such as streaming encoders, audio mixers etc.

All was installed in a remote control room directly in front of the stage. But productions like this across the globe are just usual work. Also for the Indian colleagues it is not the first happening like that. E.g. the event location was used for this years D-KOM, an internal event for the SAP developers. The only thing which was new this time is that an employee meeting was moved to an external venue. These internal so called “All Hands Meetings” take place not only in India but in all main SAP regions. We just had a similar event for all North American employees with a combined meeting between the US headquarter in Newtown Square and our California labs in Palo Alto. Also there was a session broadcasted from Singapore with our APJ president Steve Watts. Our new MD in China will share information with her Chinese employees through an event hold in Shanghai in August.

Depending on the importance of these events (board attendence, huge audience) and the need of interaction we decide to either broadcast live or only to provide a recording. The replays are published on our internal SAP portal and are available just only one to two hours after each session.

The largest meetings of this kind are the so called “Global All Hands Meetings”. These are events reaching out to all SAP employess globally. We just had such a meeting Tuesday, July 27 to inform the SAP employees about the Q2 figures. Attended by Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe + the whole board, this event was broadcasted globally and had almost 10.000 viewers online (audience figures can be 20.000 and more though). In addition there were almost 3000 employees attending the event live onsite in Walldorf. Already in the morning, Jim and Bill recorded a video message prior to their interview with external TV stations, print and online journalists, which was published internally just 15 minutes after the initial recording.

Just right now my team is preparing several media events, including locations in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Las Vegas and many more. Keep reading this blog, we will try to cover as many behind the scenes stories as possible.

Some pictures from the event in India last Friday, July 30:

Tagged as: all hands meeting, APJ Kalam, fomer indian president, global all hands meeting, internal event, Kalam, SAP india, SAP labs, sap tv, SAPTV, sven herold, vishal sikka