Sapphire 2011 was different from any I’ve been to before. For starters, the first day’s keynote address was delivered by Gabriel Byrne amid a sea of lighting effects. That was interesting enough, but the second day’s keynote should really give retailers’ spirits a boost. Retail and consumers are top-of-mind for SAP, and that can only be good news for retailers. With retail also top-of-mind for Oracle, we see a race to innovate — and retailers desperately need those innovations to keep up with their ever-better-informed consumers.

Bill McDermott, co-CEO, led off his keynote with the word Consumer in 4 foot high letters behind him. And for at least 15 minutes, he talked about the impact that the consumerization of IT (I do love that phrase), has had on the entire retail ecosystem. His speech included a video testimonial from UnderArmour’s CEO and a demonstration of how the Avon lady is now an omni-channel saleswoman — with all her products available for viewing on mobile devices. Similarly co-CEO James Hagemann Snabe led his keynote with a video testimonial from Fresh Direct — a home delivery grocer serving the New York Metropolitan area. In other words, the consumer held center stage at Sapphire.

The short-form message, obviously, is that SAP clearly recognizes the importance of retail and any other company that touches the consumer. The second short-form message is that SAP’s mobile platform is ready now to help retailers and their partners service the omni-channel consumer. The third short-form message, delivered through a variety of media and applications is — this is not your father’s SAP.

On my part, even though I’m generally not very active on Twitter, I opted to tweet through the entire keynotes. Those tweets (and the tweets of others, extended a bit past their 140 character limit) form the gist of the remainder of this piece.

1. Customer intimacy: It cannot be ad hoc, and customer information cannot be lost. We live in a hypercompetitive retail world, and every interaction is worth analyzing and quantifying. The time has come to change the entire customer experience. To re-use Mr. McDermott’s quote: “Business in the moment is the moment of truth “.
2. Doing something with all that data: In Gabriel Byrne’s scripted keynote he mentioned that the velocity of data is building by the day. And with today’s advances in hardware (SAP strongly touts in-memory computing as a tool to get better information faster) what used to take three days to calculate now takes three minutes. And we’ll need that computing power, because the customer is willing to tell us more about herself now than she ever has before. To deliver on both In-memory computing and computing over the cloud (use the cloud definition of your choice), SAP has partnered with Dell.
   On this note, we were happy to hear a sub-theme of business intelligence as Sense and Respond. Especially since this was the title of RSR’s 2010 Business Intelligence benchmark.
3. Keeping up with the Consumer: While I’m fond of saying the consumer has more power in her hand than anyone else in the store, the message at Sapphire was even more dramatic — the consumer has more technology today than NASA had in 1969 when the U.S put a man on the moon. It is really time for retailers to step up.
   Mr. McDermott observed that consumer response to upgrades and enhancements to apps is VERY different than corporate responses. The consumer just tosses the old app and installs the new one. Personally, I think the answer is a bit more complex than that (as legions of Windows XP users will attest). If there’s trust and buzz that the next version of the app is easier to use than the last one and any data created in the old version will be preserved, users wholeheartedly move forward. Bad buzz, and they wait.
4. Mobility: There are some great snippets that I got from the keynotes — great sound bites. They include mobile is the new desktop, “Mobile is the first technology in the hands of everyone in this world, regardless of their economic status. Consumers are leading the charge. “ From Mr. Snabe: “Every customer is asking what their mobile strategy should be, and how it can be connected to the enterprise, end-to-end. “ John Chen, CEO of Sybase expressed definitively that his “goal is to gain the trust of the enterprise customer “. McDermott: “Mobility reinvigorates the core. “
5. Investment Protection 2.0: Mr. Snabe talked about Timeless software — SAP’s goal is to provide its customers with software they will never outgrow. This was a major reason expressed by UnderArmour’s CEO in making SAP the company’s system of choice.

It was a great three days in Orlando. We can have any number of debates about whether or not retail enterprise software is a two-horse, three-horse or four-horse race but what is abundantly clear is that SAP is IN that race. More than 200 retailers were present at Sapphire. Not all of them have had an easy time getting on the SAP bus, but they’re still there and they seem happy. At RSR we know that competition helps breed innovation, and the consumer is driving us all to compete harder and smarter. We have technology vendors in place to support the savvy retailer. Now it’s time to get really serious about mobility and real-time. The consumer isn’t going to wait.