A short summary of the main points
It was good to be back at the annual SAP event in the UK, the last few events I’ve been to were overseas. There was a good mix of presentations and a lot of them had a heavy information content. Focus areas were mobile Business Intelligence (BI) and real-time BI. SAP’s take on real-time was mainly about embedding process control information in each business process. Adrian Rotchell from SAP gave what I thought was a very good presentation on closed-loop enterprise performance management (EPM).
It was interesting to hear what challenges others using SAP are facing. A number of organisations seemed to be making more enterprise architect appointments. I was quite surprised by the line being taken on the Sybase acquisition. The messaging was all about the mobile platform, but from speaking to a few ex-Sybase people it didn’t sound to me like that alone was big enough to warrant the hefty price tag SAP paid. Red Olive have worked with Sybase IQ, particularly in financial services, and we’ve found it a very good database platform to work with for BI applications. I’d expected to see it featuring in the roadmap somewhere.
