SAPPHIRE Orlando just ended. During the event, I got a chance to meet with tons of very interesting people. As the head of SAP's "Emerging Solutions" product group, I'm always looking for new ideas and great people to work with on these ideas, and I was not disappointed in Orlando.
When I arrived at SAPPHIRE on Tuesday morning, the first thing I did was meet with a partner who was very interested in Duet (formerly "Project Mendocino"), a joint product developed by Microsoft and SAP in my organization. Duet is a great new product that extends the world's most popular information worker environment (Microsoft Office), connecting it up contextually with enterprise information and processes. This allows information workers (people like us!) to bring together structured and unstructured information, connect formal business processes with ad hoc processes, and basically become a lot more effective. It's also a huge time saver, and it takes little or nothing to learn how to use Duet.
I guess you can tell I'm very proud of this product.
Right after this partner meeting, I had breakfast and a discussion with scripting language fans who joined us at ASUG/SAPPHIRE. SAP was represented at the meeting by Andre Labahn (product manager for scripting languages), Frank Mittag (project leader for our scripting language efforts, plus architect for our emerging solutions), Craig Cmehil (also here and craig.cmehil/blog), and a few others, plus several of our leading scripting language experts in the color in sap scripts.
I really enjoyed the meeting. We got a great chance to understand a little better the needs and interests of the community, added a new target environment to our idea list (Action Script for Flash on the client), and got a chance to meet some great, super-smart, interesting people -- plus a chance to show our dedication and commitment to the scripting languages topic and the community interested in this topic. Hopefully, some of the attendees at the event will also share their thoughts.
As an executive spokesman for SAP, I do a lot of press and analyst briefings, particularly at events like SAPPHIRE. This year was no exception, although there was one very interesting twist this year -- I got a chance to meet and talk with several bloggers this time. This was the first time I have been asked to do "interviews" with bloggers as part of the press and analyst community briefings. Looks like SAP is really taking blogging seriously! If you have any doubt about this topic, by the way, check out our Board Member blogs.
During the rest of Tuesday, I had 6 customer meetings, 3 partner meetings, 3 meetings with press/analysts/bloggers, went to the keynote presentations, and met with one of my development project teams (Mobile Fast Track -- fully modeled applications delivered on ESA in an hour or less targeting smart phone users). Wednesday was similar -- breakfast with Microsoft to discuss the future of Duet and other topics in our relationship, followed by a couple of keynote presentations by Henning Kagermann and Shai Agassi, my own presentation on "SAP for Information Workers", lunch with about 50 Duet prospects and preview customers, a meeting with investors, and a few more customer meetings to wrap up the day. Thursday was a bit more hectic -- 6 customer meetings, 6 press/analyst/blogger meetings, Hasso's keynote, a few meetings with SAP employees, a quick swing around the tradeshow floor (PACKED!!!), and then off to the airport.
So what were my key takeaways from SAPPHIRE Orlando? ESA is here now, SAP is extending our benefits to the information worker, our scripting language community is going to leave its mark on the world, and that bloggers have really arrived into the mainstream. I hope you enjoyed SAPPHIRE Orlando -- if you couldn't go in person, you can watch it online here, or you can attend SAPPHIRE Paris at the end of May. Au revoir!
