Well, it is June 6, and sapphirenow2014 has just finished.
Over 30,000 attendees, hundreds of thousands participating via social media, over 100 utilities representatives attended what is being called the most successful sapphirenow; conference.
And what a show it was, starting off with Bill McDermott announcing Fiori is now available for free.
Monday was an outstanding program produced by our ASUG Utilities chapter featuring many customers and promoting the North America Utilities Conference scheduled for September 7-9 in Hollywood Beach Florida.
At Sapphire we had insightful presentations by Gary Hayes, CIO of CenterPoint on the power of HANA and Benjamin Beberness, CIO of Snohomish County PUD highlighting the business cases to migrate to Business Suite on HANA for utilities.
We also saw informative demos on cyber-security for utilities, mobile for utilities and how predicitive analytics is changing the world we live in.
The expert tables were constantly overflowing with utilities executives understanding SAP's strategy for IT/OT convergence, customer service multi-channel solutions, mobile customer engagement apps, big data analytics, and so much more.
Then there was Hasso Plattner - providing us his wisdom on the future of the connected economy.
The HANA Innovation awards were presented, and special congratulations go to CenterPoint Energy and Alliander, as two of the three winners of this prestigious award. Utilities seem to be in the driver seat of innovation!
We learned about the new "Utility-in-a-Box", cloud solutions and how SAP is making business run better and making life more simple.
It all finished up with Dennis Miller, Dana Carvey, and of course a rousing concert with Bon Jovi.
These are exciting times for both SAP Utilities and the entire utilities ecosystem, and how the world as we know it is rapdily changing.
Wasn;t that something......
