HR Audit And Compliance as a Service on HANA Cloud Platform by Accenture

One of the sessions in the HR technology track at SuccessConnect 2014 was about the HR Audit And Compliance as a Service application built by Accenture. Ari Levin from Accenture, the partner who built the product, talked about the product and the value it brings for customers.

Ari Levin talking about HR Audit And Compliance as a Service on HANA Cloud Platform

Mary Kosita, Chief Learning Officer at Timken, an Employee Central customer told the audience why Timken chose the application, which is built on the HANA Cloud Platform. After the session I came away thinking that this session should have been in the Core HR and Payroll track rather than the technology track. There was so much focus on the application and less talk about technology. I think this shows the maturity of the HANA Cloud Platform technology and the coming of age of the service. Technology is becoming the enabler and the discussion is about the application and the value it brings for customers.

Compensation Integration Was A Popular Topic At The Talent Hybrid Session

Jyoti Sharma of HRIZONS and Andreas Muno from the solution packaging team spoke at the session on Talent Hybrid Integration at SuccessConnect 2014. I am the solution owner for that topic and was looking for particular areas of interest. There was a lot of interest in compensation integration including the upcoming variable pay integration. In fact there we so many questions, I promised the audience that we will plan for multiple sessions for these topics in future conferences that I lead.

Lots of customer interest for the Talent Hyprid Integrations topic. Photo by Chiara Bersano

Customers and Partners Can Sell Innovations Built on Meta Data Framework

This week, I managed the Technology Track at SuccessConnect 2014 at Las Vegas. There were 9 sessions on topics such as integration, extension, cloud technology, mobility and security. I had the opportunity to closely work with customers, partners, product managers and solution managers who are experts on all the above topics. I also decided to actively moderate all the sessions and support the speakers by answering customer questions when I can.

One of the sessions was on Extending SuccessFactors using SAP HANA Cloud Platform, which is a Platform As A Service (PaaS) offering from SAP. Brian Collet from AspireHR and Abhijit Salvi from SuccessFactors presented on the topic. Brian talked about the US Benefits application AspireHR has built on the HANA Cloud Platform and showed a live demo of the product. Abhijit is the platform product manager responsible for the meta data framework. He talked about how SuccessFactors can be extended using the meta data framework and HANA Cloud Platform.

A day before the session Brian, Abhijit and I reviewed the content of the session at a coffee shop in the Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas. We discussed the difference between the meta data framework and HANA Cloud Platform. That is when Abhijit mentioned to me that customers and partners can build small applications using the meta data framework and sell those applications to other organizations via the SAP Store, the same way applications built on the HANA Cloud Platform are sold today.

I suspect that the technical details and the commercial details are neither well understood nor widely known at this time. Abhijit and I discussed that we should work on this once we get back to the bay area.

Build A Translation Mobile App using @MITAppInventor In 10 minutes

In the video below, I show you how to build an Android app that translates English text to Spanish and speaks it out. You can build this app in 10 minutes.

Here is the code for the mobile app

Translation and Text To Speech Feature In MIT App Inventor

Today after dinner, I created a rudimentary mobile app that can translate any text you type in it,  to Spanish and then speak it out in Spanish. I wrote it using MIT App Inventor. It is possible to write a more sophisticated app that enables you to translate from any language to any other language with a bit more effort.

Here is the logic. You have to have some basic understanding of App Inventor. The most important thing is that App Inventor lets you develop mobile apps for the Android platform without writing any code using programming languages. Instead you create your apps by dragging and dropping components on screen.

Even though it has its limitations, apps created in MIT App Inventor can be published to the Android Market place and sold like any other app build in Java.

Here is a video on App Inventor. Go to http://appinventor.mit.edu for more info