Jon Reed on SAPPHIRE 2007 Day 1

This is Jon Reed's "roaming podcast" from the floor of SAPPHIRE 2007, Day 1. Follow Jon's unscripted, instant reactions to the press briefings and executive interviews he conducted on Day 1. On Day 1, Jon conducted numerous interviews with SAP product managers. He also sat in on several press briefings including a CIO panel of SAP customers. Jon reported back his insights from each event, and took an honest look at how the latest developments will impact consulting demand.   Highlights from Jon's uncensored and unscripted conference reactions included: - Why mid-market companies are looking at outsourcing and why they find that some SAP consultants are too specialized for their needs. - How SOA has evolved from a "good idea" to a product that SAP's partners can truly sell and therefore truly endorse. - Why "On Demand" Solutions like CRM On Demand are not as appealing to mid-market companies as one would think. - The significance of leveraging "unstructured" data and how partnerships like Duet are focused on this area. - Which SAP consulting areas seemed hot based on the day's interviews and why (hot areas included CRM, SOA, and BW/BI). - Why functional and technical skill sets are converging. - A NetWeaver executive who admits on the record that there are not enough of the "new wave" of techno-functional NetWeaver consultants to meet customer needs. Jobs like Composer and Repository Keeper may not have emerged yet, but the demand for those skill sets has. - The need for consultants with more industry-specific know-how and more business process knowledge (and why the BPX community is a factor here). - The problematic Microsoft partnership...all smiles at SAPPHIRE, but what happens when Microsoft wins a bunch of SMB business from SAP? Will Microsoft partnership ever deteriorate like the Oracle partnership has?