It’s my third day at the SAP TechEd in Bangalore and there were a few things that caught my eye. The turnout for this event seems to be getting bigger every year. Over 4100 participants turned up from over 135 countries for 3 days of learning from 200 sessions and 360 hours of lectures and hands-on workshops. That’s an impressive scale. I was here last year as well and this time I had anticipated it to be much smaller considering the slowdown. Obviously, I anticipated wrong.

The session that really caught my attention was Mark Yolton’s keynote speech or the ‘appetizer’ as he termed it. Mark Yolton is the Senior Vice-President and Head of the SAP Community Network. His was a crisp talk that put quite a bit of things into perspective. Some interesting tidbits and stats from his presentation that will be of interest to us.

* 470 exabytes of information will be created in 2008 By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006Would fill more than 5.9 billion iPods. (I hadn’t heard of a term called exabytes before. It’s supposed to be 1 followed by 18 zeros. Yikes!)

* The U.S. Patent office receives a patent application every 68 seconds.

* There is $1.9 Billion in Global Trade every 60 minutes. The BRIC countries generate 13% of global trade and represent 42% of the world’s population.

* 50% of the world’s business transactions touch an SAP system 12 million users in 120 countries.

* 75% of SAP customers are SME businesses. 30 new customers join SAP every working day.

* About 1,000 people join an SAP Community Network everyday. If the SAP Community Network were a city, it would rank among the 200 largest in the world and the top 20 in India.