Sapphire hums with Energy and Challenge Photo

During Bill McDermott’s visit in February, he invited us to see SAP in action. So his week John Torget and I trekked to Orlando with six Tuckies for the annual Sapphire conference. With more than 13,000 participants and legions more attending virtually, the event is one of the largest enterprise IT gatherings in the world. Starting on Monday evening, Fernando Castillo T’05 rolled out the SAP welcome mat, introducing the group to an exciting program of events including talks with SAP execs and behind the scenes tours of the massive conference venue. My highlight was a morning tag-team presentation by Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe. With on-stage hugs and high-fives the performance presented a pair of execs who complemented each other well, making the controversial co-CEO model seem natural and effective. The themes of their talk echoed Bill’s talking points at Tuck: mobility for reach, in-memory processing for speed, and collaboration for innovation. The first two themes were very evident on the show floor—with “campuses” of booths, stages, and gathering areas showing off SAP innovation and deepening product offerings. Clearly SAP is investing in its core and, through its Sybase acquisition, rapidly developing a strong set of mobile apps. Bill’s message was now – start building the sense and respond enterprise that can make business happen “in the moment.” The third theme, collaboration, admittedly was less developed and resented a frontier for SAP. Snabe noted that SAP’s key strength was process. Collaboration will require a greater emphasis on people. He noted that SAP was spending much more time observing human interaction to better understand the collaboration process. In that space, they showed off new CRM apps running on ipads that married social media with SAP’s deep enterprise data to enable sales teams to collaborate around the customer. While impressive, SAP is playing catch-up to Salesforce in CRM and is facing high expectations driven by consumer-oriented media like Facebook. They are not alone—all firms rushing to build the social enterprise face this consumerization challenge.

By the afternoon, the Tuckies lost themselves in the sea of presentations, booths, and discussions. CDS Fellow Anant Shivraj gushed about “fantastic sessions on post-merger integration issues and in-memory computing” while Julien Kervella collected swag from the likes of Cisco and HP. Coupled with a Sting concert and day at the beach, maybe Sapphire will become another spring tradition for tech-minded Tuckies.

(l to r) Professor Eric Johnson, Elissa Kline T'11, Julien Kervella T'11 and Daniel Torres.