SAP holds a number of conferences to provide “key opportunities for current and future customers, as well as partners, consultants, and users, to learn about SAP solutions.” SAPPHIRE NOW is one of these events, and is a premier business technology event offering unparalleled insights and opportunities to drive business results across all levels. It is a hub for senior executives, business manager and decision makers to leverage with SAP’s ecosystem and how it can enable a profitably enduring business. Sapphire offers sessions and thought leaders, giving customers the chance to interact and collaborate with participants from all parts of the globe. We expected SAPphire 2011 to be about Mobility, Analytics and Business Intelligence, and we’ve seen these topics initially taken on the first day. There’s more to come.

At the conference, we’ve seen SAP partner with Dell on In-memory and the cloud, boosting their relationship on databases and cloud computing services. SAP customers are then allows to launch apps on Dell VIS Next Generation Datacenter Platform in order to compete with rivals like Ocarina and Scalent, and in return gives SAP a step forward in distribution and access. This is also a pretty good strategy against its close competitor, Oracle.

We’ve also heard Vice President of IT at EMC, Tony Pagliarulo take on virtualization and business intelligence, that virrtualization is key to dominating the private cloud and thus is fundamental to the first step of approaching that goal. EMC his one of the biggest customers of SAP and Oracle despite the latter two being rivals. HP’s also making an appearance at the conference, demonstrating brand new financing offering, and its HP ProLiant DL980 G7 and HP ProLiant DL580 G7 systems which are certified for running SAP HANA, the first of its kind.

SAP customers such as Pinkberry Ventures, an LA-based frozen yogurt chain founded in 2005, testified of SAP’s efficiency towards business profitability. SAP Business ByDesign doubled the business’ size year after year. Mobile and social enterprise being central during the conference, we’ve heard Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, talk about yesterday’s initial keynote speech, giving is a different insight to the industry.

“It’s a compelling vision. 2015. Where are we headed? What’s the future? They put a bunch of futurists out there, and what we saw is a bunch of light bulbs going off, thinking about, ‘what can I do?’” Wang recalls SAP’s mid-day keynote. “The next question is, what we’ll see on day 2 and day 3, the question being, ‘how can I pay for this innovation…and where’s the technology to take me there?’ I think if [SAP] follows that script and goes through that story, customers will be able to say ‘I remember day 1, and I know where I want to go.’ That will help pave the way for customers trying to figure out what’s next.”

SAP’s Hagemann Snabe pointed out that “this is a time to innovate, not consolidate.”We want to bring disruptive technologies to those customers without disrupting their infrastructures. We can do that because we have installed a very modern platform in those customers,” and to do that, SAP is undergoing a rapid innovative cycle.