Just out on SDN,

If you've noticed a bit of a silence from me for the past few weeks that is mostly due to being on vacation in Italy for a few weeks but, also due to some very exciting stuff happening between SAP and Colgate. For the past week, Ed Herrmann and I have been in Palo Alto for the first week the "Imagineering Fellowship." The goal of this pilot program is to create an environment where customers, like Colgate, can come and work with SAP's Imagineering team to help provide a more in-depth understanding of how SAP's solutions are used in real enterprises and the challenges faced by them. It will also allow us to co-innovate solutions and approaches to those needs, which of course helps both SAP and Colgate align our short and long goals. Lastly, we hope to share some of solutions we create here on SDN.

For this particular engagement, we will be focusing on increasing BI utilization at Colgate and working to make Identity Management in the enterprise easier and more flexible. These topics areas are of high importance to Colgate's long-term application strategy and will help us get the most out of our existing SAP installations. I would also hazard a guess that these topics are of importance to any enterprise with a mature SAP install base and a big BI instance.

For those of you not aware Dan and Ed are the two of the stars of SDN, they won the Demo Jam contest in both the US and EMEA last year at SAP TechEd with their SAPLink product as well as just recently causing quite a stir with their Wii demo (which as already made into the top 25 of all time SDN Blogs, almost surpassing Shai's "I LOVE Open Source---Really!").

Now they are quite literally "in the house" in Palo Alto - can't wait to see what comes next...

Link to SAP Network Blogs - Colgate-Palmolive & SAP Imagineering Fellowship