ASUG GA Chapter Meeting

On February 8th 2008, ASUG organized a successful and well-attended local chapter meeting in Atlanta, GA. Originally planned to be held at the Home Depot, the event moved to the Rennaissance Waverly Hotel the last minute to better accommodate the crowd for logistical reasons. Savantis Group was one of the main sponsors, and made available several prices to the attendees including 50+ Labtop Procleaners and one TomTom GPS Car navigation system.

The event had a strong SAP Retail flavor. One of the main sponsors and organizers - the Home Depot - is about to go-live with SAP Retail in several stores in Canada. Chris Verheuvel, SVP and General Manager of SAP Retail gave an interesting overview of SAP\\\'s Retail roadmap in the US. According to him, the US Retail industry vertical still spends 70% of their development dollars on in-house, custom developed applications; versus 30% spent on package applications. The trend for the future will see many retailers moving away from custom developed applications to package solutions such as SAP Retail. Roughly 5700 customers worldwide are running SAP Retail today, out of which approximately 400 are in the Americas region. That tells you that there\\\'s still a significant opportunity in the Americas for further expansion of SAP Retail.

Retail Store solutions is an area in which SAP retail will spend significant research and development dollars in the next five years. Chris showed us a video clip of the SAP Retail Store of future, set-up inside a solutions center of SAP in Switzerland. The day you can scan all items in your shopping cart while browsing through the store, and subsequently pay with your cell phone is not that far off it seems. SAP Retail is definitely tackling the "holistic store environment of the future".

There were also Retail specific sessions presented by Seal Consulting and Cisco Systems. Cisco explained how SAP Retail and Cisco touch each other throughout the "Intelligent Retail Network". C. Timothy Johnson of Cisco presented on the New Store Front, and how Cisco and SAP are helping Retailers create a connected and secure store environment.

Towards the end of the day the ASUG organization drew the prizes for the attendees, and let me tell you, there was no shortage of prices this time. Congratulations to H. Joshi from CSC, who walked away with a new car navigation system. Our sympathy goes out to Ray Berry from Coca-Cola, who drew the initial winning ticket but arrived minutes too late to collect his win. Ray, please drop by our booth at ASUG/SAPPHIRE in May for a new shot since we will be giving away multiple navigation systems at this event!

Roel Deuss
President, Savantis Group

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