I have been attending Sapphire in Orlando for the first day. I wanted to share some of my experience for the event.
They had a really cool large touch screen. It was fun to play with. It has to be seen if the idea can be used for practical purpose. I don’t think we will be working with such a tool in the coming few year. So I’m looking forward to Teched or next SAPPHIRE where it hopefully will be able to use the screen to drill down in reports from Business Objects. Then the screen could be useful for business scenarios.
Compared to Teched there is a lot of differences.
- The show floor is much bigger and all consulting firms are represented along with hard and software vendors. Many of the large companies have created really large booths where they are showing off their expertise. At Teched it was only product companies how showed of their new tools. I guess that this is because the audience is more geared towards decision makers.
- There were a lot of small sessions where it was possible to have some really interesting conversations with all the other people around. This was a bit like the Expert Networking session from Teched. They where in the program, which made it much easier to find. The program for the day was qite large, and it took time to go thru all the pages to see what to attend.
The note was sent from both Frankurt and Orlando it was an interesting concept but it worked out pretty well. From the first keynote with Al Gore and Sir Richard Brandson there was not a lot of value from a technical perspective.
- Brandson talked about you needed to dream to create your ideas. And that IT plays a vital role in Virgin. There was no mention if Virgin was a Best Run company running SAP. Some rumors said that Virgin was an Oracle shop. Brandson was currently exploring ways to help the world using entrepreneurship. He believed that a lot of problems could be solved and prove a business case.
- Al Gore talked about his project with reducing CO2. He said that SAP was doing a pretty good job on reducing CO2 and impact their customers.
The afternoon keynote was.
- ASUG hosted by the chairman of the ASUG board and the CEO of ASUG(I seem to recall). I did not get a lot of value from this. There was a lot of promises on what they wanted to do. Disclaimer I’m not going to join them, since I’m from Denmark and just Freelance developer.
- Colin Powell was outstanding as a keynote presenter and story teller. He talked about missing his private plane, and how he had to go thru the TSA screening procedures with all what that contained. He covered social media, that he did not approve of until he saw how much impact it had with having 22.000 followers on Facebook. He believed that the world had changed to the better while he had been in office, and we only hear the bad stuff which is happening in the world. If you are going to see a keynote I would recommend this.
The keynotes can be seen at the website sappirenow.com.
What I liked most from the day was that.
- Talking with SAP users and consultants and learn how they used SAP. It is really interesting what kind of industry solutions there is and what the difference between them is. They all seem to cover an area of a business that you have not though of could be different. I guess that this is the main reason to go the event.
- Attending the press conference at learn that SAP will continue to focus on the mobile platform with the Sybase acquisition. It will be an interesting opportunity to start with seeing how the platform is working out.
- Listing to the other SAP mentors and the private mentor meetings, to see what new stuff is on the radar.
I’ll unfortunately not be able to attend the rest of the conference. Since I’m presenting my Google Wave project Caseish.com at Google IO.
