I've wanted to post more frequently about the events going on here at SAPPHIRE but, to be quite candid, I haven't had the time. Finally, I seem to have found a moment to take a look at the bigger picture.

So, day one is history and overall I think it went pretty well. We started Sunday night at an informal dinner meetup at The Sweet Lowdown. Nothing formal just everyone getting to know one another in a casual environment. Dan Farber had this to say on his Between the Lines Blog.

We had our fair share of travel and business issues that have kept a few of the bloggers from making the trip to Atlanta but, we have a great group on hand.

As far as the bloggers go, there was a mix the Enterprise Irregulars and the Social Media Collective , Mike Masnick of Techdirt, Michael Cote of Redmonk, we even have on hand a few SAP bloggers Thomas Otter and Craig Cmehil.

We had a number of meetings yesterday with various executives but at the end of the day a few of us Jason Busch, Jason Wood, Dan Farber, Brian Sommer, Dennis Howlett and I got backstage after Hasso Plattner's keynote and sat down with Hasso for about 30 minutes. Dennis had this to say about the keynote and the subsequent discussion.

You'll notice that the posts so far are mix of positve, neutral and even negative. What you don't get to see in the posts is the back-n-forth between the bloggers and our executives. It's unfortunate that that part doesn't come through because that's where (IMHO) the value is; relationship building, the sharing of ideas and best of all, the learnings ocurring on both sides of the conversation.

More to come