Friday Morning Report

By day 3 I realized that I was barely keeping up with the pace the Mentors and Bloggers had set and the amount of content they were generating from the various meetings and interviews, I was literally in scheduling hell as I tried to track everything – luckily they were all very good about it and helped me out along the way.

Last night during the celebration night, Thorsten caught me off guard (I got him back though) with some conversation about “innojagd” which continued throughout the evening as well.

During today though we kicked things off with attending the roundtable discussion with the recently arrived from Orlando Vishal Sikka.

(captured through the production team window)

From there we were in our next  executive meeting with Matthias Haendly on the topic of Business Suite were we had so many questions and comments flying back and forth we never got to the new 2010 strategy, at least not in detail.

During a quick lunch break, we were joined by Rajshree Jani from the Community Network team who got to meet a bunch of the Mentors and managed to capture many on video which you can check out on the Mentor channel.

Then we jumped from there straight into our next executive meeting with Markus Schwarz, Christoph Behrendt and Eric (my apologies I’m lost my notes on the spelling of the last name).

This meeting on ByDesign was amazing and many realized that you can’t show a demo to a group like this one since we never completed a simple Sales Order as the questions were coming in so rapidly on multiple different angles and topics. I’d have to say this was one of the most deep dive technical sessions we had and was completely by chance.

We then jumped from that session straight over to our last executive meeting with James Farrar who gave a walk through of SAP’s new sustainability report and as an employee I personally walked away amazed at what I learned about my company during the meeting.

We then of course ended the day and this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW with the Hasso and Vishal keynote…

Here we are the morning of our third and last day here in Frankfurt and I’ve been thinking back on the amazing amount of things that happened on the second day.

As with the first day the Mentors and Bloggers at the event made their mark with solid questions and a positive attitude towards each and every topic!

The morning started off with a roundtable and panel discussion on SAP’s Product strategy in particular “Meeting Customer Demand in a Changing Business Environment” which we followed up with an executive meeting with Jonathan Becher.

A most impressive session where Jonathan challenged the Mentors and Bloggers with not only providing their insights into SAPPHIRE NOW but also issued a challenge that I will be putting into the Mentor forum today. Many Mentors jumped from this meeting into the Roundtable on Mobile Business Solutions for Micro-Business in Emerging Economies while others jumped into one with Orestis Terzidis from SAP Reasearch.

Were topics were flying from everything from Open Source to future plans and moving forward.

We then had the amazing keynote by the co-CEO’s followed by the celebration night!

I’m here in Frankfurt, at the SAPPHIRE NOW event but not in my usual role, I’m here actually working with the Bloggers and Mentors. Yesterday, Monday was our first day kicking it off with registration opening at noon and our first meeting at 1230.

Understanding In-Memory

Our first meeting was with Ingo Brenckmann from SAP, and our topic was “In-Memory” and many of SAP’s analytic engines. The 12 of us in the meeting started it off getting a briefing and better understanding into SAP’s “In Memory” technologies with some examples such as APO and liveCache which I personally was installing at my old company back in 2004 and 2005 up to all of the new things coming that we’ve been hearing from Hasso.

Andrea Kaufmann

Global Communications as usual has done an amazing job taking care of us here in Frankfurt, Andrea Kaufmann has been wonderful in organizing and making sure this leg of the program has been working and together with Mike and Stacey ensuring scheduling and meetings were available has made for a very easy job for me.

Siemens SIS

Therefore our first day was a smooth productive day leading up to an amzing evening looking at art in the Schirn Kunsthalle – Dick is quite the art lover and debated passionately with the gallery workers around the art, I still did not see the Bacon influence (not Tom’s bacon gum either) but Dick was convinced.

Getting Technical

This was also an evening important to me as I was able to discuss “innojagd” with Michael Koch, Nigel James as well as Dick Hirsch. I was able to go into not only more details but also was given the opportunity to further fine tune my thinking and ideas to ensure I’m sending over the proper signals and of course am following the best possible path forward.

Computerservice Wolf

Although I think many will agree that a major highlight was our meeting with Jim Hagemann Snabe during the evening and his taking the time to speak to us and share some of his thoughts moving forward and around the new SAP, for Gregor it was a second opportunity to get his questions in just like during the press conference earlier in the day.

Now I’m looking forward to day 2 and the several executive meetings we have ahead of us!