TweetContinuing in the SAP World Tour in Toronto today, I went to a breakout innovation session on NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) and HANA, with Steve Holder from their BusinessObjects center of excellence. HANA, in case you’ve been hiding from all SAP press releases in the past two years, is an analytic appliance (High-performance ANalytic Applicance, [...]
Tagged SAPWTTweetThere was a big crowd out for SAP’s only Canadian stop in its World Tour today: about 900 people in the keynote as Mark Aboud took the stage to discuss how SAP helps companies run their business, and look at the business trends in Canada right now: focus on the customer to create an experience; [...]
Tagged SAPWTTweetDan Kearnan, senior director of marketing for business analytics, provided a overview of SAP’s business analytics in the short breakout sessions following the keynote. Their “run smarter” strategy is based on three pillars of knowing your business, deciding with confidence and acting boldly; his discussion of the “act boldly” part seemed to indicate that the [...]
Tagged saprbtTweetWe had the chance for a small group of bloggers and analysts (okay, I was probably the only one with “blogger” on my name tag) with Mark Aboud, Managing Director of SAP Canada, and Margaret Stuart, VP for the Canadian BusinessObjects division. Since this was a roundtable Q&A, I’ll just list some of the discussion [...]
Tagged saprbtTweetSAP is holding a Run Better Tour to highlight some of their new releases and customer success stories, and today it’s in Toronto which allows me to check it out without having to get on an airplane. I attended the Women’s Leadership Forum breakfast this morning, featuring Amanda Lang of CBC News, and she’s speaking [...]
Tagged saprbtTweetNot a lot of blogging yesterday; a couple of good keynotes (but I’m not going to blog about Richard Branson, Al Gore and Colin Powell), a press conference, the sustainability roundtable, a couple of other short meetings and networking at Blogger Central. Some links to items of interest: The never-ending stream of #sapphirenow Twitter updates [...]
Tagged sapphirenowTweetPeter Graf, SAP’s Chief Sustainabilty Officer, and Scott Bolick, VP Sustainability, spoke to a group of bloggers and analysts at a sustainability roundtable today. Graf started with SAP’s definition of sustainability: increase short and long-term profitability by holistically managing economic, social and environmental risks and opportunities. Sustainability changes business processes drastically, especially those processes that [...]
Tagged sapphirenowTweetIt’s been quiet for several months for conferences, but things are heating up again for the next four weeks. Here’s my upcoming schedule: This week, I’m at PegaWorld in Philadelphia, including chairing a workshop on Wednesday morning on case management The week of May 3rd, IBM Impact in Las Vegas The week of May 10th, [...]
TweetTo wrap up the proceedings from last night, I was asked to critique the efforts of the groups and pick a winner: as it turned out, I was the only judge. Each of the groups did great work, and I want to call out some of the specific efforts: The Business Use Case group had [...]
Tweet8pm We’re just getting started with the Process Design Slam: one of the face-to-face sessions that make up the collaborative design process that started a couple of months ago on the Design Slam wiki. Marilyn Pratt has identified the six groups that will each work on their part of the design, collaborating between groups (a.k.a. [...]
TweetWolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Volmering gave us an update on NetWeaver BPM, since I was last updated at SAPPHIRE when they were releasing the product to full general availability. They’re readying the next wave of BPM – NetWeaver 7.2 – with beta customers now, for ramp-up near the beginning of the year and GA in [...]
TweetWe had a blogger roundtable today with Soeren Balko, VP in the SAP NetWeaver BPM architecture and design group, and Marek Kowalkiewicz from the Brisbane section of SAP Research with an overview of the research and special projects going on at SAP. Innovations tend to emerge from the research centers – in conjunction with the [...]
TweetI was sitting in the blogger room this morning at SAP TechEd in Phoenix, and heard Marilyn Pratt mention my name over at another table: usually something that makes me perk up my ears, since Marilyn is a primo community builder, and I had the feeling that I was about to be recruited for something. [...]
TweetMarge Breya is responsible for a huge portfolio of SAP products, including SOA, BPM and the BusinessObjects BI unit – that is, pretty much all the SAP stuff that I’m interested in. At an analyst/blogger roundtable this afternoon, she gave a quick overview of the high-level strategy for NetWeaver, and had Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas [...]
TweetIt’s the last session of the day – and for me, for the conference – and I’m attending the open forum on workflow and BPM hosted by a number of people from inside and outside SAP with experience in different workflow and BPM areas. The format was 100% audience Q&A, and the focus was really [...]
Tagged sapphire09TweetI spent yesterday and this morning in the global communications center at the north end of the conference center, since SAP’s teams for managing social media (that’s us bloggers), press and analysts brings the SAP executives to us for meetings up there. They pipe in the keynote sessions, give us comfy tables with internet access, [...]
Tagged sapphire09TweetI started to get paranoid yesterday when my meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering was scheduled at the same time as Ginger Gatling’s session on NetWeaver BPM, then they didn’t show for the meeting – was there something they didn’t want me to know? However, it was just a scheduling glitch, and eventually we [...]
Tagged sapphire09TweetA small group of bloggers had the opportunity to sit around a table with Marge Breya to expand on what we saw during the press conference on BusinessObjects Explorer. She discussed how unstructured data has being elevated to first class status within SAP, with analytics and reporting tools that can lay over unstructured as well [...]
Tagged sapphire09TweetJon Schwarz, SAP Executive Board Member, gave the global press conference at SAPPHIRE this morning, with a focus on BusinessObjects Explorer (formerly known as Polestar) and how it helps their customers to become clear enterprises: seeing, thinking and acting clearly. As Prashanth Rai twittered, it’s more like a mini keynote than a press conference, or [...]
Tagged sapphire09TweetI’ve been absent from blogging for a while – with the exception of the links posts that are auto-generated from my Delicious bookmarks – due to a very heavy client workload and very few conferences to blog about. I have been twittering, but my Twitter stream tends to contain random thoughts and personal observations rather [...]
