Philadelphia, USA ... the city of brotherly love. Like most large American cities, this one is full of noise, cars, people of all types, and promise. This particular Tuesday morning (September 14, 1999) saw 14,000 extra's thrown into the mix as delegates to SAPPHIRE'99 - the 11th annual  SAP America's customer conference. They came from far and wide - some were consultants, some were from the press (about 500), some were from SAP, but mostly they were customers or prospects. Why did they come? Some came for the parties (and they were not disappointed), some came because they could get away from work, but most came to learn more about this phenomenon called SAP and how it might help their company compete in their increasingly competitive and fast paced world.

And then there was this thing called mySAP.com. What was it? I asked around and got different opinions about what it was. I thought it was a way for users to customize their menu's .. which is nice, but why make such a fuss about it. Boy, was I wrong.

Anyhow, early Tuesday morning 14,000 of us trundled from our 15 designated hotels to the Philadelphia Conference Center (PACC). When I got there (around 8am) I realized that I had pretty much trundled there by myself ... as I had got the starting time wrong. It was 10am, not 8am. Most of the 14,000 delegates were probably still in bed.  On the bright side (as this is America, you know), it gave me some time to wander around and check it all out!

The PACC is a bit of a rabbit warren, but all I had to do was follow the bagels and the kiosks. There were - I'm guessing here - somewhere around 200 web-linked PC's setup as kiosks all over the place. They gave you access to SAP's website where you could (if you had not already done so) customize your own agenda for the three days. This sounds like an easy task, but with over 400 education sessions and literally dozens of partner-led technology exhibits it was quite tough. On top of that you had to find time to wander around the 'Collaborative Marketplace' containing tons of stuff (more on that later) and also the vendor exhibitions (apparently 275 of them, but I didn't count them)!

Other interesting observations (well, to me anyway) was that Skytel was lending pagers for free, Fedex had a booth there, you could rent a phone, send flowers, create a logo (eh?) ... and to get from one end of the building to the other took five minutes (I told you I was early). I also saw all these signs about the "City of e". Given my idea of what mySAP.com was (a way to customize your SAP menu's) I was very confused. It was only the mySAP.com logo's emblazened on them which told me that they had not been left there from a previous conference. Boy, was I wrong here too. 

Around 9:10am something curious happened. I was just headed in the general direction of the coffee, and everyone was headed past me in the opposite direction. Naturally I changed course and found out that they were headed for Hall C. Hall C was where, at 10am (50 minutes later) the conference would begin ... and these delegates wanted to make sure they got the best seats! When I discovered this, I resumed my quest for more coffee and showed up at Hall C just before 10am.

I entered Hall C to the sounds of Lenny Kravich's "American Woman" which may not be too everyone's taste, but does it sound great on those large speakers! Lights flashing, spotlights roaming the ceiling, a huge stage probably 100 yards wide (which I tried to pace but there were too many people) flanked by four enormous TV screens. Then we were treated to about 30 seconds of deafening African drums (I think), and with a roar and a flash the conference was underway.

On to Article 2 of 4 >>>