Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

The final speech has been spoken, the final demo has been given, and the final beer has been consumed. (What do you expect, the conference is in Germany… 😛 ) The beer was consumed by someone other than me (I don’t drink beer) but I sure enjoyed the company anyway. One of the things that I have found both this year and last is that with the smaller conference people are much more available. Obviously the full SAPPHIRE conference is very large (up around 9,000 people I was told) but the Business Objects portion of it remains smaller than the American Insight conferences. That means I get to talk to many more people that are both interesting and interested in what I might have to offer. Today was a great day for that. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 3 – It’s Over”

I had an opportunity to meet the head of ASUG at lunch today. It was a good lunch (I’ve already posted about the food 🙂 ) as we got a chance to discuss some of the initial feedback on BOB regarding how user groups are going to be managed under SAP. I posted a few notes about it here already. In a nutshell there are some potentially exciting things that will be coming in the next year or two for the regional user groups. But of course that’s not all that’s going on today. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 3 – Part 2”

Wednesday has dawned (bright and early, thanks to Alan Mayer who I am sharing a hotel room with 😛 ) and so I am able to post some thoughts before the day gets along too far. I watched only a portion of the general session this morning so I don’t really have any comments on it. The first track session that I plan to attend is on the text analysis tool that Business Objects purchased last year. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s essentially a tool that allows you to scan unstructured data like blog posts or forum topics 🙂 looking for information. One of the standard demonstrations shows how this tool can let you scan hundreds or thousands of emails that come into your customer service department and get an overall “feel” for the sentiment of those communications. It’s an interesting idea.

While I have time, some general thoughts and ramblings about the conference experience… Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 3 – Part 1”

I called this “Part Only” since I didn’t get to do a “part 1” today like I did yesterday. My presentation was this morning so I took the extra time this morning to complete my preparations for that, and then Alan Mayer (another Integra presenter) had his presentation this afternoon. As a result I have not managed to get to too many other presentations. I just got finished watching Tim Nightingale present on the benefits of migrating to XI 3.0, and there are some interesting new features that he called out as specific benefits. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 2 – Part Only”

This is my second post of the day from Berlin, Germany, where I am attending the SAPPHIRE conference. This is the first merged conference since SAP acquired Business Objects, and it has been interesting to see what is the same… as well as what’s different. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 1 Part 2 (Wrap-up)”

So far I’ve been to the general session and one track session. I was wondering how the logistics were going to work with SAPPHIRE and the number of people here… it worked out fairly well. Once the main room filled out they sent overflow people to the “theaters” which are located throughout the conference facility. It was a good presentation; they showed some nice integration between SAP and various Business Objects (or other) products, and according to the presenters these are technologies that are available right here, right now. Meaning they’re not future integrations, they’re already here.

There was also plenty of new stuff (or so it seemed) for the SAP folks in the same presentation.

I also managed to track down one of the folks that has been responsible for the Insight conferences in the past and tried to confirm the information going around (or lack of information 😆 ) regarding the fall Insight conference. At this point he could not formally confirm anything, so I guess we’re still in the dark at least for a while. I know that there have been some announcements regarding a fall conference in Dallas, and we did talk about that. Essentially I got the “can neither confirm nor deny those allegations” sort of remarks. 🙂

The conference overall is huge, of course. But it’s relatively easy to find the Business Objects wing and hang out there. I’ll try to post more details about the track sessions and other information as I have time (and laptop battery) to do so.

One of the advantages of living in a big airline hub city like Dallas is that flight connections are generally good. Things start to fall apart for international flights… especially for some destinations. Berlin is one of those places, it seems. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE 2008 – Getting There is NOT Half the Fun…”

I made it a personal goal when I started this blog to have at least two posts a month. Here it is, May 15th, and there are no posts yet. 😳 The main reason is that I am trying to get projects wrapped up or at least to a point where I can be gone for a week, since the SAPPHIRE conference in Berlin starts next week.

I have lots of things started. 🙂 Maybe I’ll get some finished on the plane. 😎