All Eyes Will Be On SAP At Its Sapphire Customer ConferenceAll Eyes Will Be On SAP At Its Sapphire Customer Conference

An estimated 14,000 people will converge in Atlanta this week for SAP's Sapphire conference, at a time when customer communication couldn't be more critical for the software vendor.

Just last month, SAP's bitter battle with Oracle for customers took a surreal turn with a lawsuit filed by Oracle accusing SAP of "corporate theft on a grand scale." Within days of that lawsuit, product and technology group president Shai Agassi resigned to pursue environmental activistism and political aspirations.

If SAP executives address this recent turmoil with attendees, it'll likely be done swiftly and with as little fanfare as possible, and only to convince them that it's not creating a distraction for the company. Instead, executives will focus most of their energies trying to convince attendees of these things:

That SAP has had good early success in getting customers to adopt its service-oriented architecture based on its NetWeaver middleware and has a road map in place for those who haven't yet upgraded. That primarily involves upgrading to the mySAP ERP 2005 enterprise resource planning suite, released about eight months ago. About 2,000 customers have migrated to the new suite, said Peter Graf, SAP's executive VP of marketing for the technology and product group, in an interview. That's just a fraction of the company's 40,000 customer base and midway through 2007 makes up just 20% of the customers Agassi declared in December will have migrated to the new suite by year's end. Yet Graf noted that mySAP 2005 is designed primarily for large companies, or about 16,000 of SAP's customers. The number of those who have adopted it is in line with SAP's exectations, Graf said, given the relative newness of the software. "Adoption is very, very strong," said Graf. "I don't see hesitation." That a lack of a relational database in SAP's product line shouldn't be a concern to customers or considered a weakness for the company. SAP execs will talk about the company's Business Intelligence Accelerator, a tool used for gaining knowledge from data within SAP applications, said a spokesman. SAP refers to this tool as an "in-memory database" and something that can be used as an alternative to a traditional relational database. (The bigger message: You don't need Oracle.) That SAP is a go-to vendor for helping customers solve their risk and compliance issues. SAP is putting more focus on shopping its wares to the office of the CFO, said a spokesman. That NetWeaver is a leading middleware offering for helping businesses solve their integration problems. Graf cited a Morgan Stanley survey in January of CIOs that showed 16% of respondents having purchased NetWeaver in the past year, compared with 13% who purchased IBM middleware and 4% who purchased Oracle middleware. NetWeaver was outranked only by Microsoft, with 17%. That's a big reversal from a comparable survey by Morgan Stanley in 2004, which showed SAP with just 4% of middleware purchases, Graf said, adding that SAP believes it can beat Microsoft for accounts where Java plays a big part in development. "We have a tremendous amount of customers using NetWeaver as an integration platform," Graf said, even if most aren't yet using it as a foundation for a service-oriented architecture.