Sunday, May 27, 2007

ASUG and SAPPHIRE 2007

Well, ASUG and SAPPHIRE have come and gone. I don't think you'll be able to find too many people that would agree if you if you thought the event was a poor display....

SAP put on an incredible show with almost zero glitches. 10/10 for presentation.

Once again, it was very interesting walking through the shark infested waters known as the "Vendor" hall where each stall has a salesman's eyes tracking you (and in particular, your ID badge) to see if you are to be labeled as a potential victim, um, I mean, customer!!!

It seemed like every stall had a free IPod drawin, except most were drawing at the end of the conference when most people were stranded at Atlanta airport, due to the storms around the country!

Needless to say, the IPods are safely in someone else's pocket but my kids did come away with some goodies.... The big hit was Esker's little luminous stick on lights. They must have made 100,000 of these things and about the same number of T-Shirts. They take the overall prize for money well spent... They can tell us if it was well spent. ;) Bouncing balls, glowing balls, shirts, .... all made the trip home.

I sat through 2 usability sessions on Redwood and Supply Chain Event Management's integration with Outlook and those were fun. They dished out some nice thank you gifts there as well.

At my talk, which seemed to be about a mile from the "Shark Tank", there were a few interested folks which I was pleased with. In addition to the talk, I was able to catch up with several colleagues of the past including Dave (Hoosie), Laurent, Brian, John, Sue, Julie, Greg, Shreekant, ... You know who you are and it was great catching up with you.

Hopefully we'll all meet again at Tech-Ed.... and then meet some new faces.