Attending Vinnie, SAP's mega-conference represents all that is good and bad about the industry. Good in that a significant amount of business gets done this way within the ecosystem of the largest enterprise vendor. Bad in that half of the cost of enterprise software is sales and marketing. The competitive anti drives this spend, but a good part of the industry has moved towards SaaS, open source distribution, and ad hoc events as alternatives. Initially this happened because of necessity (SAP itself froze such spending just before the bust, .community models are beginning to support this shift. The precursor to the watershed moment was when the blogger corps gathered for Port and Cigars on the first night. Many met for the first time, some old friends, similar to the usual suspects feeling at Web 2.0 conferences. We didn't know what we were in for, but formed a tight knit community with conversation built upon conversation. The next morning we arrived to the Blogger's Corner within a Press Room that took up half a wing of the Orlando Convention center. We had tight schedules of one-on-one interviews and immediately shared them to create the right many-on-one encounters. There is certainly camaraderie within a press corps, an experience I've had from the days in politics, but there is definitely competition that prevents such productive behavior. From second-hand feedback, we even outperformed the core. How often is it that a journalist has hands-on experience as an ISV, an analyst has no commercial bias, or even an employee that has a reputation that in some cases trumps bias? Every scheduled interview, time a SAP executive stopped by the blogger's corner or casual encounter with one at a reception -- the conversation was more than bargained for. Either rigorous domain expertise was applied, or a cutting edge Enterprise 2.0 perspective sliced through well curdled butter. When I was briefed on Best of Breed does not Breed. Well, Best of Show is a Dog. First of all, the longstanding claim against a diverse vendor population is that if proliferated results in complexity unwanted by IT. Second, this contradicts the NetWeaver vision of SoA reducing the need to standardize on a software stack and enabling ISVs to deliver value. Third, it's the ecosystem that wags the dog into needed change. Fourth, why would software be the one area of spending that shouldn't adopt a portfolio strategy. Fifth, when I look at the industry today I see substantial innovation. I'm harping on a soundbite out of context, and the comment was probably more directed towards Oracle. Perhaps the funniest moment was when a guy from a Canadian newspaper came over to the blogger's corner and got in an argument with me about the quality of blogging and trustworthiness of Wikipedia. It didn't start that way, and one of the better guys for such a debate, but while explaining the basics I showed him how his newspaper had 40 inbound links, compared to others with 400 that week -- his simply claimed he didn't believe it. He'll probably go off an write a damning article on the bias and quality of the blogosphere, to complete his own circular reasoning, but I'm sure he discovered something new. Perhaps the best moment for me in the newsroom was talking with Niel Robertson's encounter with Jeff Nolan, at relatively little cost:
- The leading enterprise bloggers participated in the conference. They didn't feel handled and while there was a bit of controversy in posts, nothing became a crisis.
- A blog posts, rare with any event, was substantial and gained Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web
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