A look back at SapphireNow 2011:

A week has now passed since SAP’s SapphireNow event took place inOrlando.  So I thought it would be a good opportunity to see what news and views came out from the event.

Certainly one of the main focuses at SapphireNow was on HANA.  Speaking at the event SAP’s CTO Vishal Sikka, said “HANA is the foundation of our renewal, the technology at the root of our innovation.”  There were also a number of customer testimonials with global companies touting its value, ease of deployment and low cost of ownership.  Tom Greene, CIO of Colgate-Palmolive cited savings in time with queries going from 77 minutes to 15 seconds – which are certainly impressive figures!  While the analyst community has generally been positive towards SAP and in-memory computing, Thomas Otter at Gartner did have one note of caution as he tweeted during the event “SAP is basically betting the business on HANA”, so it is important to users of all sizes that it is a success.

In addition to HANA, there were also further updates on the integration of Sybase’s technology.  At SapphireNow, SAP demonstrated how it was using Sybase’s infrastructure to help companies connect the mobile platform with the enterprise system.  Furthermore, SAP also demonstrated how companies could build applications on top of the Sybase platform using a software development kit.  Speaking to the FT, co-CEO Jim Snabe, said “we believe that the mobile use cases will be a lot more customer specific then the normal standard software.”  It is certainly encouraging to hear that SAP realises that especially in the mobile field a “one size fits all” approach won’t work for most customers.

Overall, SapphireNow didn’t necessarily throw up too many surprises but it did seem to provide users with greater reassurance regarding SAP’s future plans.  Blogging on ZDNet, Dennis Howlett, commented “I sense the company is becoming comfortable with itself and is both clearer and more certain where it and its customers’ futures lay. There wasn’t the foreboding of forced march upgrades, wildly disruptive change – although disruption is never far away.”

Both Craig Dale and Mike Dean from the User Group were in Orlando, so over the coming weeks and months they will be feeding back their first hand experience on the event to our members.

Difficult Work and Tough Decisions

Previously I mentioned that I was on the way to Sapphire at Frankfurt as one of the judges of the SAP EMEA quality awards.  As a group of judges we’ve now agreed our decisions.  It’s actually a really hard job and full of challenges. The main reason for this is that there is some great work going on out there! All the contenders represented great examples of project delivery. When you review the candidates you really get a shiver down your spine through the memories and experiences that you have encountered with your own activities in this area.

The comprehensive schedule of factors to consider all add together to give you a complex set of information to consider. Reviewing all this takes a great deal of time and in my case, also meant taking part in phone calls between the judges on a Public holiday to fit in with the other judges. But from all this work and analysis,  a surprising level of agreement came from the judges.

Now – at this point if you were perhaps expecting an announcement of the winners sadly you are going to be disappointed because you need to wait until Monday afternoon when it will be announced at Sapphire in Frankfurt.

Sapphire in Frankfurt and Orlando.

I’m off to Frankfurt in a couple of weeks time to take part in the EMEA Sapphire. Interestingly this is at the invitation of SAP to take part as a judge in the annual quality awards, specifically for the Large Enterprise section of the awards, which is a great sign of their renewed customer focus. This is how the awards work. Each SAP region within EMEA area have had their own internal deliberations to present the top organisations from their area and then whittle the number down to 6 finalists. The six finalists then provide written input and then follow that up with a presentation to the panel of judges – from this the judges assess the organisation based on some quality principles to select a gold, silver and bronze award winner. Last night I spent a lot of time reviewing the written input and there is some impressive examples of how to be successful with SAP.  I’m not allowed to share who the finalists are so you’ll have to wait until Sapphire to find that out when the winners will be revealed.

At the same time as Sapphire in Frankfurt there is an equivalent session across the pond in Orlando. At this session there is also a hectic session for SUGEN with several days of work planned – along with the other User Group members our User Group will be represented, continuing to collaborate to deliver more for our members, such as the work on SAP roadmaps.

………………Of course, all this is subject to the vagaries of Icelandic volcanoes!