SAPPHIRENOW 2016: What the word cloud shows us

This is part 2 of my review of SAPPHIRENOW 2016 from the perspective of a B2B eCommerce manager.  You can read part 1 here.  The above word cloud was produced by interrogating the entire SAPPHIRENOW Session Catalog of 1892 sessions with relevant keywords and then plotting them as a word cloud.  The larger the word, the more often it appeared in the Session Catalog.  The assumption that I’m making is that the frequency of the appearance of these key words is directly correlated to the level of importance to the SAP ecosystem.

To prove that my assumption is correct the #2 keyword of all sessions was “SAP”.  :-)  Right behind the “Customer”, which is appropriate.

A quick scan of the wordcloud positions puts the following key words as the top 10 themes of the presentations, in rank order (% of citations):

1. Customer (99%)
2. SAP (92%)
3. Business (59%)
4. Hana (47%)
5. Solution (45%)
6. Digital (34%)
7. Enterprise (32%)
8. S/4 (23%)
9. Experience (23%)
10. Data (22%)

As I looked at these keywords some interesting word pairings emerged that I thought I’d share with you:

• Success versus Failure (13.4% vs. 0.4%) – I guess no one likes to talk about failures at conferences.  Everything is supposed to be peachy keen.  Too bad.  I think we learn more from failures.
• Cost versus Profit (9% vs. 3.5%) – Why aren’t more people interested in the bottom line?
• Enterprise versus SME (Small to Midsize Enterprise) (32% vs. 10%) – Wouldn’t you think that if there really was a migration of focus towards smaller businesses that they wouldn’t be outnumbered by a factor of 3X?
• Business versus Technology (59% vs. 8%) – It kind of struck me funny that there was so much talk of business in the presence of so much technology being sold.  I guess we may see the paperless office after all eh? :-).
• Digital versus Analog (33.7% vs. 0.1%) – Believe it or not, there was one presentation that had the word “analog” somewhere in its description.  Paradoxically, it was entitled “Robotics is the Key Enabler for Digital Transformation”.
• Transformation versus Simple (14.6% vs. 6.0%) – Transformations are definitely harder than simple.
• HANA versus Fieldglass (46.7% vs. 2.1%) – What’s Fieldglass???  It’s all HANA all the time!
• hybris versus Concur (8.4% vs. 3.0%) – Selling stuff is way more popular than spending money…as it should be!
• Internet versus Speed (7.8% vs. 3.1%) – Maybe next year we’ll get better wifi at SAPPHIRENOW.

So that’s it from SAPPHIRENOW.

My bottom line?

The suits are talking and the geeks are roaming the convention floor.

Sam