Last week I was in Orlando, Florida for ASUG/Sapphire 09. SAP put the numbers at 10,000 in physical attendence with 8,000 connecting via the Internet.  I'm told that this makes it the largest Sapphire ever.

Our booth looked like this:

Oh-so-neat and tidy! Then we went and filled it up with IntelliCorp people:

From the left you have: Tim Chang, Michael Hugen, Richard Hurst, Chris Trueman, Jerry Klajbor and Allison Denning. Tim Girouard was with us too but he was doing a product demo back at the hotel and missed the photo-shoot.

For the past couple of years the top three topics at events like ASUG/Sapphire have been: upgrades, support packs and landscape synchronization. This year people were talking much more about 'lifecycle management'.  Enhancement Packs and Upgrades still got a worthy mention but people were taking a broad view of their lifecycle needs. We had lots of great discussions and were able to draw on many high-profile successes as we demoed the latest LiveCompare release. See my post the other week about a customer-hosted 'SAP Experience Day' for just one example or our case studies on our new-look website.

The exhibition hall was vast.  It wasn't a problem making sure I got my 10,000 steps in each day! One of my favourite exhibitions was this joint Vodafone-McLaren F1 simulator:

HP's stand featured these very impressive ice sculpture 'juice bars':

All our product specialists stayed on for a couple of days to get kitted out with our new LiveCompare 2.2 release. After that I was able to sneak away for a day or so down in the Florida Keys.  This was taken as the Sun set from a small harbour on Marathon:

Sadly the weather didn't go to plan so I wasn't able to watch the Powerboat racing. Maybe next year.