First time in years that I missed this despite SAP being so kind to invite me again. Too much busyness on my side I'm afraid.
Kind of interesting not to be there, sitting here slurping live videos, sniffing at tweets and reading blog posts by my friends.
Did I learn anything? Well, I definitely and sorely missed being there and seeing all my friends, but still, here are a few takeaways from afar:
SAP shows the usual tenacity in regards Business By Design, and I applaud them. Here my fellow Irregular Josh debunks a critic with aplomb giving you the gist of how they proceed and accept reality despite what I could imagine being cries of desperation from a marketing department.
SAP has no qualms about telling it as it is. In the otherwise very geeky and highly enjoyable keynote by Professor Plattner he even showed how the sales curve hit the wall last year, even telling about customers who acted up and said things along the line of "sure we have a contract but we will never pay".
By the way, Professor Plattner stressed that he was not speaking as an employee, merely an academic, then merrily using "we" about SAP in every other sentence. Quite the natural thing to do, humanised keynote behaviour we all know to appreciate.
SAP know what they want. Despite crisis, despite competitors acquiring each others, SAP shows the long term commitment to enterprises despite any small stuff a nitpicking critic can dig up. And that long term attitude is what makes a difference. Here's Pascal Brosset, as good as always, explaining another EI friend, Vinnie, what SAP's vision of the future is.
And last but not least, it seems we can say good bye to the "The best-run companies run SAP" on a full size image of some anonymous person at all European airports. Now it's "Clear New World". And I have to admit I like it. Oops seems the old one has been relocated to fine print next to the logo, ah well...
But they got it right with the new tag line, IT means less resource use if used right and that ends up not only on the bottom line, but used to full extent it can move any corporation closer to sustainability. I've been chirping on that theme since my very first post herein more than four years ago so how could I not like it?
Have to admit my first thought was to rip their new tag line and tweak it to "Brave New World" for my own enterprise framework, but after remembering the somewhat warped content of Mr. Huxley's book I had second thoughts :)
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