We finished the morning with a keynote/general session by Dennis Moore of SAP, who gets points for making us laugh within the first 30 seconds. We still seem to be covering a lot of the basics of Enterprise 2.0; maybe that’s to be expected given the newness of the meme, although I would expect that most of the people here probably have a bit of knowledge about Enterprise 2.0 — they’re at an Enterprise 2.0 conference, after all.
He also discussed how the boundaries between work and home are starting to dissolve, in part because we’re bringing our expectations from our souped-up home-based computers and networks into the more restrictive corporate IT environment. Not satisfied with what IT can provide, business units are buying externally-hosted services via a software-as-a-service model, and building their own portals using RSS feeds.
As I’ve mentioned here before, he talked about how SAP has exposed much of their product functionality as web services so that those services can be consumed by other applications — whether a structured BPM application, an enterprise mashup or a portal — to provide visibility into the data and functionality of SAP. This makes SAP a vital and essential part of the ongoing environment rather than being relegated to the dreaded “legacy” category.
He demonstrated (finally! A live demo!) a nice “smart workspace”, essentially a portal environment with all of the SAP service-enabled functionality available for dropping into any of the containers in the environment. He actually poked fun at how SAP or one of their partners might take months/years to create a custom application that you could now create yourself in their smart workspace.