I was excited about attending SAPPHIRE this year, but had a conflict and cancelled my travel plans last week. (Well, Vienna might have fit in my schedule since I'm done with exams). I'm disappointed to not have the change to hang out in the Blogger's Corner again, especially since I'm also going to miss TechEd later this year due to my wedding. I'm not too worried though, because I know the corner will have plenty of insight. (As Charlie said, bloggers are interested in insight, not scoops). Oh, and even Oracle made an appearance.
Dan Farber has great coverage of the keynote where Hasso Plattner outlined SAP's "new idea" for on demand software - a vision that includes community and collaboration at its core. Jeff says it's criminal that SAP sat on this so-called "MySpace for the enterprise" for a year. Of course, this natural given that enterprises are slow-moving by their nature. SAP TechEd '06 was eye-opening for me - it's clear these guys get it from the top-down. (Credentialing bloggers was a big clue). If they truly want to play in the small- and medium-business markets, however, they're going to need to learn to innovate faster. As Tom Carroll suggests, this is a monolithic challenge but ultimately service abstractions are the way to achieve this agility.
This is part of the trend of "consumerizing enterprise software" - the fact is, even in the enterprise, people are starting to use these free Web 2.0 sites, and they expect the same experience, if not more, from software that costs a hell of a lot more.
If you want to follow SAPPHIRE, Frank Koehntopp put together an aggregated feed.