Those of you who know me (Peter O’Neill) know that I’ve lived in Germany for 30 years. So, I am posting a regular blog – probably bimonthly – where I highlight something important for you that has or is about to happen in Germany.  We’ll start with a history lesson. In 1972, the last Apollo moon mission was launched, Germany won the European Championship (soccer), and five consultants and developers left IBM Germany to start their own company called Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung GbR. They wrote  financial accounting software for the local Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) factory, which incorporated the then-revolutionary idea of using terminals and keyboards for data entry and reporting instead of the more common punch-hole cards. This made their software appear to work in “real time,” so they called it R/1. Now, 40 eventful years later, SAP is undoubtedly one of the most important technology vendors in the industry and still doing very well, thank you.

So, happy birthday SAP!  As someone who was part of the early HP team that partnered with you to market R/3 on HP-UX back in the 1980s, and now work with numerous SAP marketing professionals in my current capacity, I enjoy the success you are having.

I particularly enjoyed the most recent challenge SAP posed me when they commissioned me to present to their internal marketing community on using mobile technologies for B2B marketing. I am told several of my colleagues had turned this down but I relished the idea of researching something so new. I will present that research in my next Forrester Webinar in a few weeks’ time.

The irony of this blog posting is that I am writing it while on the plane to Los Angeles, where I am working our Marketing Leadership Forum and then delivering an advisory workshop to one of the leading digital marketing service providers to the tech industry at their San Jose office.  

But I need to get up very early on Wednesday morning because I also present a German language Webinar to (I hope) many German marketing professionals on the topic of marketing automation.  The organizers told me that they sent the invitation out to 45,000 marketing professionals in Germany, which I find quite amazing: that there are so many of them. But I assume that these are marketers across all industries, not just the technology sector.

Need more details?  As always, I’d love to hear from you on this and other topics.

 Always keeping you informed! Peter