Sheryl Crow Set To Rock SAP Sapphire
But the conference won't close before Sheryl Crow makes an appearance on Thursday night. Crow, known for hits "If It Makes You Happy," "Everyday Is a Winding Road," and "All I Wanna Do," headlines the wrap-up party for SAP conference attendees at the TD Waterhouse Centre. The arena sits about 17,248 during basketball season. About 10,000 customers have registered to attend the annual Sapphire event.
Sapphire 2006 will focus on "Accelerating Innovation, Energizing Growth.” The conference features more than 180 customer session. About 243 partners are involved, including Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Tata Group, an SAP official said.
Attendees can expect to hear news from SAP on market segments, vendor partnerships on Monday, customer announcements on Tuesday, and product news on Wednesday.
Bill Swanton, vice president of research and development at AMR Research Inc. will look to see how SAP will enable development in its enterprise services architecture (ESA) platform. "They've been talking about it for the past two years and now we want to see how it's coming together and whether it's ready for prime time," he said. "Now customers want to see proof."
SAP said it intends to provide that proof, along with a view on customer relationship management applications. Hints come from two previous announcements, said SAP spokesman Bill Wohl. SAP recently developed a new user-interface for customers to access hosted CRM applications.
Sapphire attendees also will hear about the next version of mySAP ERP. "We are helping customers move into the SOA [service oriented architecture] world and the next version of the ERP will be service enabled, so we'll talk about what that means for users," Wohl said. "We'll also provide a continuing report card on the maturing of the platform ecosystem strategy and NetWeaver adoption."
On the agenda, too, SAP will announce four IVNs, a group of independent software vendors (ISVs) and customers that focus solely on one industry's business challenges.
The four industries SAP will announce are Retail, Consumer Goods, High Tech and Public Sector, Wohl said. SAP already offers an IVN for the banking sector, and this week announced a group focused on the chemical industry.
Chemical industry giants Celanese, Dow Corning, DuPont, Eastman Chemical Co., Hexion Specialty Chemicals and NOVA Chemicals will work with SAP and the IVN for chemicals program partners. These include IBM Global Business Services, Invensys, LogicTools, Meridium, NRX, OR Soft, OSIsoft, Pavilion Technologies, SmartOps Corporation, TATA Consultancy Services, TechniData and Vendavo
And, for the first time, this year’s Sapphire conference will co-locate with the ASUG (Americas SAP User Group) user conference. Between the two conferences, approximately 550 sessions are available.
