Remember where you were 23 years ago?

I distinctly remember where I was 23 years ago today when I learned the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded on lift-off. Growing up in the town closet to the Kennedy Space Center, almost everyone had some sort of connection to NASA. Usually, we would have a "fire-drill" around launches so that all students could go outside and watch. However, by the time January 1986 rolled around, Space Shuttle launches were so common that we weren't released for the Challenger launch. I'll never forget the principal making the announcement over the PA. 

President Reagan spoke later that day:

“The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and ’slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”

New blog from New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn

These are banner days for the New York City government when it comes to blogging. Yesterday, I posted about the city granting press credentials to bloggers (granted after they had filed a lawsuit) and today comes this from the NY Times:

...Ms. Gotbaum [Betsy Gotbaum, New York City’s public advocate] posted an item taking note of a new blog, the Red Room Blog, by the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn. The blog takes its name from the ceremonial ground-floor room in the east wing of City Hall, where Ms. Quinn makes official announcements, often before the Council meets in its ornate chamber upstairs.

Read Ms. Gotbaum's views on blogging and government officials. Hopefully, it will come to pass.

[New York City][blogging]

New York City issues bloggers press badges

SAP has long been a leader in engaging the blogging community (Jeff Nolan got things rolling and Mike Prosceno has been running with ball for the last several years). It's good to see that my fair city of New York has gotten into the act finally. 

"Three bloggers who had sued New York City after the Police Department denied them press credentials because they work for online or nontraditional news outlets were issued credentials on Friday after the police relented..."

(I was originally going to title this post "NYPD catches up with SAP," but thought that perhaps that that might be misinterpreted). 

[New York City]

SAP panel and Charlie Rose interview with Leo Apotheker & Andrew McAfee

SAP did an event for the press here in the West Village (New York) office in November. Here's a synopsis, plus the link to the webcast replay:

On Friday, November 21, 2008, leading IT, business, and government experts joined SAP co-CEO Léo Apotheker in a panel discussion in New York, sharing research and insights into IT strategies and investments for lean economic times.

Moderated by AMR Chief Research Officer Bruce Richardson, the panel also included Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee and IT consumers, including the secretary of administration for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the CIO of Joerns Healthcare.

Webcast replay

Afterwards, Leo and Andrew appeared on Charlie Rose. A couple of bullet points of random items that I pulled out of the talk in somewhat chronological order:

• Charlie asks Leo to explain what business software is
• Andrew speaks to the benefit of integrated software across an enterprise 
• Leo talks to why a competitor can't beat SAP just by hiring away all its developers
• Andres gives a basic definition/explanation of Cloud Computing (we couldn't leave this out, now could we?)
• Leo on how business will change over the next 5 years
• Charlie: "is everything going to be Open Source software?" Andrew: "No, but we don't exactly know where that boundary is."
• Leo discusses SAP and Open Source software
• Andrew talks about the coming ideas that he thinks will be important in IT
• Charlie asks Leo what business SAP could be in in 10 years that they are not in now. Leo: "Maybe, we could even be in hardware, it depends.... probably not making them [computers] but shipping complete appliances..."

Charlie Rose replay

[SAP] [Charlie Rose]

Recent news articles on SAP

First off, Happy New Year to my readers (both of you). 

I've noticed that SAP has been in the news quite a bit lately. To save you exhausting Google searches, I've compiled a few here. No need to thank me, but click on my Google ads; I'm trying to beat the $5.53 I made in '08. I don't think 7 bucks is out of the question for '09. 

The other transition

At the end of the month, Léo Apotheker will take over as SAP AG CEO. He's been co-CEO for the better part of 2008 along with Henning Kagermann, but now will become the sole CEO although Henning is staying on until the middle of this year. This article was particularly interesting to me because it gives a bit of personal biographical information on Leo. Everybody always talks about the fluency in 5 languages, but I was unaware of some of the rest of the details. 

"Die Welt hat viel zu sehr auf Pump gelebt"

This is from an interview with SAP co-founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board Hasso Plattner and roughly translates as "The world lived too much on credit." 

This is a great opportunity to practice your German. 

SAP and FSC speed SMB apps
SAP and Fujitsu Siemens Computers next year will start to sell pre-packaged servers, designed as a fast-start application set pre-tested and pre-configured for midsize companies in the manufacturing, wholesale and services industries. The integrated bundle will include SAP’s All-in-One ERP system hosted on a Primergy RX300 S4 rack, along with a version of SAP MaxDB database running on the SUSE Enterprise Linux operating system from Novell.

BI Software integrates data from multiple sources (press release)
Business Objects announced the next version of BusinessObjects BI OnDemand software. BI OnDemand is a complete suite of BI capabilities, including a data warehouse, delivered on-demand. Two key innovations in BI OnDemand help customers create and manage data warehouses in the cloud more quickly and flexibly, making sure business users receive the most current reporting and analytics information. First, the new content creation and development capabilities help customers to ensure that data from both on-demand and "on-premise" applications is quickly available to business users. Second, the BI OnDemand accelerator for Salesforce CRM enables customers to build a data warehouse with massive amounts of Salesforce data and prepare it for reporting and analytics - reducing the implementation time from weeks to days.

[SAP] [Business Objects] [Fujitsu Siemens]