TechEd Blogger Sessions

Posted on October 2, 2007
Filed Under Enterprise Software |

We met with Peter Zencke this afternoon, but rather than put my notes in this post I’ll point you to an interview with Zencke that Dan just posted.

Our group session with Zencke was interesting when it became less scripted. Not surprisingly we ended up talking about BBD and the implications for SAP. Zencke clearly gets the implications for the direct sales model that SAP has traditionally pursued. We had a good exchange about maintenance and SAP’s insistence that they can support the 4.x version in perpetuity with premium maintenance.

I wonder if there is an opportunity to do third party maintenance much like they did to Oracle with TomorrowNow. More immediately it would seem that there is an open opportunity to do Business Suite to BBD migrations, a scenario that Ismael, Niel and I talked about at length following this roundtable.

I have to admit that I still have a lot of doubt about SAP’s positioning of BBD in terms of what market segment they are targeting, but I am inclined to believe that it will be successful because SAP is genuinely committed to making it so.

Next we went to a roundtable to discuss "customer co-innovation" and this was really disappointing. It was a 60 minute panel that had introductions take up 50 minutes of the time. Fortunately the time was extended another 15 minutes so we could ask some questions. I would blog about it but I just didn’t get anything unexpected or interesting from the exchange.

Lastly, we went to a roundtable with Vishal Sikka, which was one of the best sessions of the day because of the quality of interaction and breadth of issues covered. I didn’t take notes in that session so will link to the other bloggers who do cover it when they post.

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