User Conference in the news

The annual 2012 SAP User Group conference is done for another year and it was certainly a great success.  I have already talked about my personal recollections from the event, but this year’s conference garnered plenty of media coverage too. Cloud, licensing and BusinessObjects in particular were at the top of the media agenda.

On cloud, Ray Wang from Constellation Research raised the issue of SAP’s cloud investments, highlighting that merely moving processes to the cloud does not count as innovation. He reiterated the importance for SAP of helping customers to understand what these cloud investments actually mean for them on a day-to-day level, particularly as so many find cloud pricing confusing.

Our Q&A with Tim Noble also saw plenty of media interest in light of the results of our recent licensing survey. What was clear is there are still many questions to be answered and more choice and flexibility is needed with regards SAP’s licensing model.

It was not only SAP executives who were generating column inches at the conference.   There were plenty of end user stories too, as a number of organisations talked about their SAP journey.  The BBC and Royal Free NHS Trust both talked about how they have benefited from using BusinessObjects dashboards.  While British American Tobacco (BAT) discussed its use of LiveCompare to extract data for audit and compliance. These and other speakers provided great insight for our delegates into the challenges, opportunities and best practice around their SAP implementations.

I, like many other people, am already looking forward to the 2013 conference in Birmingham.  Hopefully we will see you there!