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Reporter's Notebook: On The Eve Of SAP's Sapphire 2008

It's Sunday night in Orlando, and I'm getting ready to attend Sapphire 2008, SAP's annual user conference. Tomorrow I meet with co-CEO Henning Kagermann, and am curious to hear more about this cross-pollination idea he mentioned last week between the company's new SaaS offering and its traditional licensed software.

Kagermann said during SAP's Q1 earnings call with analysts last week that the company is proceeding with a plan to "reuse the investments in Business ByDesign and bring new ... innovations to our large installed base in a careful way. Now we are ready to announce the first of these examples at Sapphire ... ." He also said this approach will help customers bring their total cost of ownership of software down, by building "different components which we will charge to our clients and reuse the platform we have used in Business ByDesign for that." Henning, can't wait to hear about it, and I'll write about it at informationweek.com. Stay tuned.

There's probably a lot that the traditional installed base can benefit from in the Business ByDesign work, despite the slow, somewhat awkward start for that service. (In fact, the very notion of the idea reminds me a bit of Microsoft's "software + service" strategy).

One other note ... after arriving at my conference hotel today I headed down to the pool to catch a few rays, and a cute young couple canoodling in front of me in the pool were carrying on a soft, intimate conversation about ... network security. I kid you not. I was flustered and embarrassed to be overhearing such a conversation. Love by the network dashboard green light ....

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