Sapphire Now 2010 in Orlando - My First Sapphire

[Former Member]

This is my first time attending Sapphire Now, and my overall impression is great. It shows SAP's firm commitment to their customers.

This is also my first conference that I attend as a SAP Mentor which is a great honor. Great honor comes with great responsibility. But servicing community is nothing new to me. I have been running the Dallas Fort-Worth BusinessObjects User Group successfully for several years, and I have been very active in building and supporting user community. I enjoy the success because of my sincerity. Our community members see me as "one of them", and not a white knight riding on a high horse.

At Sapphire Now, I have the great and rare opportunity to meet many of the fellow Mentors face-to-face. You can tweet and chat all the time, but nothing  beats face-to-face meeting. The Mentors are a bunch of energetic, fun-loving, wonderful  and knowledgeable people. And I enjoy their company.

 

At Sapphire Now in Orlando, I have seen a demo on BusinessObjects Explorer, using the In-Memory technology. I think SAP is heading the right direction. At Rent-A-Center, we have faced a lot of challenges because of the humongous size of data....e.g. inventory data. Querying those massive data will take a very long time. That won't help our internal customers to make sound and timely business decisions. Since the In-Memory processing server or the Accelerator server sits between the Data Warehouse and the BusinessObjects application server(s),that means it doesn't only speed up the Explorer's processing time, but also can speed up the processing time of the Web Intelligence reports as well. I can't wait to actually "test drive" it.

[added on 5/24/2010]

I have realized that the Agenda Builder and the event list from another source did not cover all the available events at Sapphire Now/ASUG Annual Conference. Perhaps we need to better coordinate and sync up all the events across all sources (e.g. Agenda Builder, SCN, etc.) . It should not matter whether the events are hosted by Sapphire staffs or ASUG staffs, from the attendees' point of view, there should be no difference. If we can sync them up across the board, we can maximize the exposure of the events to all attendees.

The following are some additional pictures on my camera...

The Press Conference...

simulcast of Bill McDermott in Orlando and Jim Hagemann Snabe in Frankfurt...



simulcast of Bill McDermott in Orlando and Jim Hagemann Snabe in  Frankfurt...



Aslan...need no introduction.



BI Community Meeting in the ASUG Community Lounge. There were many attendees with lots of great ideas and suggestions. But the Meeting Room area was quite noisy. And when you have more than one community meetings in session, it was difficult to hear the conversation. Perhaps the meeting rooms should not be adjacent to each other. Instead, they should be arranged in a star formation where the main lounge is in the middle, surrounding by the meeting rooms outside. That will add some distance between meeting rooms and avoid the interference.



another picture of the BI Community Meeting...