This morning SAP CEO Bill McDermott kicked off Sapphire in Orlando.
 

Here are my Top 3 takeaways:


HANA remains front and center – It was very clear from the selection of customer stories (Under Armour, ENI) that HANA remains at the center of the SAP value proposition – again at this Sapphire. Faster, more data, better insights are the value propositions of HANA, and we have heard them over and over. McDermott even referenced data compression capabilities. 

 
McDermott opened Sapphire 2015
S/4HANA gets a roadmap tomorrow (!) – McDermott also referred to S/4HANA getting a roadmap tomorrow, pre-viewing what Bernd Leukert would communicate in his keynote tomorrow, on Wednesday. So a big tease, but the problem of having 3 keynotes in 3 days and McDermott said he didn’t want to spill the ‘beans’ – but then he did in regards of talking geographies and industries. We will know more in 24 hours.
Google's Schmidt talks about Google Docs and Google Cloud Platform
SAP attracts brands & partners  – No matter where SAP is in re-inventing itself on HANA, S/4HANA, the HANA Cloud platform etc. – it manages to attract key brands to build on its platform or to partner with SAP. Today it was Under Armour (which has been used a few times already), but also partnerships with Facebook (!) and Google (around Google Docs and using Google Cloud Platform). But not only had I missed what SAP is partnering with Facebook about.

MyPOV

A good start for SAP’s Sapphire with a general preview of key things to happen. Never easy to kick off Sapphire and not give away too much – so a good start by McDermott. At some points it seemed to be all over the place though – of course simple came up often, outcomes were featured prominently, but I struggled to find the red threat at times (may have been the early start, too). Overall more of a light appetizer than substance – very much looking forward to the main course with Leukert tomorrow.

 

Business Research Themes

Tech Optimization

Roles

Chief Information Officer

Tags

facebook, google, google cloud platform, hana, hana cloud platform, s/4hana, sap