So I had an awesome time at SAPPHIRENOW - in all my roles. I was an IBMer manning the booth and meeting clients, an SAP mentor, and a blogger. It was my first year at SAPPHIRE as a blogger, and I must say it was quite educational watching the big guns like Dennis Howlett, Vinnie Mirchandani, Ray Wang, Jon Reed and Frank Scavo at work.
I already blogged on my personal blog on my report outs - so let me just put the links here in case any one is interested.
SAPPHIRENOW 2011 Report Out day 1 - BusinessObjects 4.x is pretty cool
http://andvijaysays.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/sapphirenow-2011-report-out-day-1-businessobjects-4-x-i...
SAPPHIRENOW 2011 Report Out day 2 - CEO Keynotes, On Demand
http://andvijaysays.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/sapphirenow-2011-report-out-day-2-ceo-keynotes-on-deman...
SAPPHIRENOW 2011 Report Out Day 3 - HANA, Mobility, Gateway and Sting
http://andvijaysays.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/sapphirenow-day-3-report-out-hana-mobility-gateway-and-...
What I particularly noted this time is that there is a good amount of technical content at an otherwise "event for suits". Hasso and Vishal keynote would have gotten the same applause at Teched. And the product managers went to great technical depth when we discussed finer details with them. I cannot begin to say how much I appreciated the "beneath the hood" view.
For me personally, it was a lot of fun doing videos with many of my friends - for SAP as well as for JD_OD.com. If you have not seen JD_OD yet, you have no idea what you are missing. Pls check them out. The quality of their content, and the technical quality of the videos itself is top notch. It was quite an honor for me to take part in these videos. And guess what - video blogs are much more fun than typing one 🙂 . Thanks to Dennis Howlett, Jon Reed, John Appleby, Harald Reiter and David Hull for the collaboration.
If I had one complaint - it was the lack of time to hang out more with my mentor buddies more. Time just flew by, and I could not even meet some of the mentors once. And some others - we just waved at each other from across hallways etc. I cannot wait for teched to catchup more with my favorite gang. There was just a couple of exceptions, which came unplanned. I caught up with Vitaliy at the GC party on Tuesday - and of course we spent 2 hours talking about...what else, HANA ! And I could also spend a little bit of time with the awesome enterprise geeks gang - Ed Herman, Thomas Jung, Rich Heilman and Craig Cmehil on Wednesday evening before the Sting concert - and had some more HANA talk 🙂
In a few months, Teched will be here - and it is a shorter plane ride for me. Can't wait to meet every one, and see what is cooking in SAP labs !
And finally, a big thanks to Mark Finnern, Mike Prosceno and their respective teams for all their help in making SAPPHIRENOW a memorable event for me.
