I did a half-day jumpstart session at the SAP Insider BPM conference in November, and just received my score: 4.25 out of 5, which was nicely above the average across all speakers of 3.91. Interestingly, I received higher marks for “speaker” than for “content”, probably because I had way too much content for 3 hours.
Marilyn Pratt of SAP captured me on video at the reception at the SAP Insider BPM 2008 conference. Yes, there were drinks involved.
I was up bright and early today to hear Soum Chatterjee from SAP Labs give an introduction to their business rules product, the recently-acquired Yasu (which Chatterjee claims stands for Yet Another Start-Up). I’ve had a bit of a look at it in the context of the NetWeaver BPM demos that I’ve had, but wanted [...]
I spent the morning presenting an introduction to BPM in a jumpstart session at the SAP BPM 2008 event put on by SAP Insider and was going to spend the afternoon by the pool, but was tempted by Ann Rosenberg’s invitation to her afternoon session, A Complete Guide to SAP Tools for Business Process Definition, [...]
I have my fall schedule mostly sorted out, and here’s my confirmed lineup so far: OMG BPM Think Tank, October 6-7, Chicago. I’m on the program committee, and will be leading a roundtable on achieving collaboration between business and IT in BPM on the first day. PegaWorld, the Pegasystems user conference, October 19-21, Washington DC. [...]
Up next is a deep dive on Business ByDesign, the SaaS offering for SMEs. The deep dives so far have been kind of shallow, and mostly centered on sales, marketing, pricing and packaging of the products rather than much to do with functionality. We’re also running 45 minutes late, and seem to be getting later [...]
I missed the late-morning sessions, but I’m back here for Prasad Akella, Senior Director of SAP Business All-in-One Solution Marketing. We heard about some of the new integrations with All-in-One: just announced last week, the CRM 2007 product is now tightly integrated with the All-in-One functionality, providing marketing, sales and service components. Also, the Business [...]
Jeff Stiles is back to give us an update on the SME product portfolio, and there’s an interesting tie-in to yesterday’s message at the Business Objects day: the portfolio includes both business management and business intelligence, with a pretty strong emphasis on how BI adds value to SAP’s traditional business management. He went through the [...]
After an intro by Jeff Stiles, SVP SME Solution Marketing, Glenn Wada, GM US Strategic Growth Enterprises Group, gave us a business update on SAP’s small and medium enterprise (SME) efforts. 75% of SAP customers are SME, although only about 30% of software sales (>1B Euro). SAP defines SME is anything under $1B in revenue, [...]
Jonathan Becher hosted a wrap-up Q&A with Doug Merritt, Marge Breya and Sanjay Poonen. I’ve consolidated the responses rather than attributing them to the individuals: On reasons for Business Objects’ continued growth: major contributors include having the SAP sales force also selling Business Objects products, and expansion of the product suite to include GRC and [...]
“Oracle price-gouges customers even more than we do.” Although Dennis disagrees with my recollection of the sentence structure. Update: Dennis now agrees with me, and expands on the context.
Keeping with SAP’s excellent blogger relations, a few of us bloggers had a chance for a quick chat with Doug Merritt about acquisitions in the space, the “walking dead” of BI vendors, popular BI applications, SaaS BI, go-to-market strategies, the transition to being part of SAP, new product segments, selling into big accounts versus mid-market, [...]
Franz Aman, VP of Product Marketing, gave us a product roadmap of the BI platform within Business Objects and SAP. Unfortunately, he declared the session as being under NDA, even though a lot of what he talked about had nothing to do with future product directions, so I can’t share it with you. The true [...]
Moving from business intelligence to the applications that rely on business intelligence, we heard from Sanjay Poonen, SVP and GM of Performance Optimization Applications. He started off with the cycle that we saw earlier in the day, with insight being linked to execution and process optimization, and focused on the governance, risk and compliance aspects [...]
Marge Breya, EVP and BPM of the Business Intelligence Platform group, gave us a whirlwind briefing on the product portfolio, which is made up of Business Objects assets, some SAP assets, and new products being built jointly: Governance, Risk, Compliance (GRC), where they hold the overall #1 position worldwide with a 21% market share Enterprise [...]
Narina Sippy, SVP and GM of GRC at Business Objects, hosted a panel of three major partners: Lee Dittmar of Deloitte, Glenn Gutwillig of Accenture, and Dan Miller of IBM GS. Inevitably, this started with the “mine’s bigger than yours” comparisons, because apparently when it comes to Business Objects professional services practices, size does matter. [...]
I’m here in rainy Boston at the Business Objects Influencer Summit, which was kicked off with Jonathan Becher, SVP of Marketing for Business Objects. It’s a very process-oriented message (which explains why I’m here): using business intelligence to drive process efficiency, improve insight to close the gap between strategy and execution, and add flexibility to [...]
I’ve been sticking close to home for the summer, but my fall lineup is about to begin. So far, I’m definitely attending the following: Business Objects Influencer Summit and SAP SME Day, August 12-13, Boston. This is an analyst/press event, not a public conference, but I’ll be blogging from there. International Conference on BPM, September [...]
SAPPHIRE is only a half day today, and there’s really only one session that I wanted to attend: Cheryl Mascaro, Enterprise Architect at Intel, and Thomas Volmering, BPM product manager at SAP, talking about BPM in Action. Volmering started with the now-familiar SAP positioning of BPM that I’ve seen earlier in the week: BPM evolving [...]
Wolfgang Hilpert, SVP of BPM for SAP, must be tired of seeing my face by now: an accidental lunch encounter and an interview yesterday, his session at the NetWeaver theater this morning, and I ended my day with his panel on SAP and BPM that also included Benjamin Salter of Valero Energy, Janelle Hill of [...]
