As SAP’s latest user conference draws to a close, what should the software giant’s customers and prospects expect over the coming months?

The event was fairly news-lite, with no big announcements from the supplier that would really shake up the market. But it was clear that there are certain messages that your friendly SAP sales rep will be pushing to IT leaders the next time he or she comes to call.

At a strategic level, the phrases you will hear most frequently this year are collaboration, “business networks” and “strategic agility”. The latter, in particular, strikes me as a classic IT marketing buzzword that means very little in the real world of running an IT department. But overall, SAP is predicting that its customers will need to become more flexible, more open, and more connected with their supply chains from customers to staff to suppliers.

The biggest SAP users – the likes of Nokia, Colgate-Palmolive, Rolls-Royce or Kraft Foods – who presented at the conference exist in a global environment with many outsourced functions and a potential for complexity that would cripple a business that does not adequately support critical processes with technology. They rely on close co-operation with suppliers and fast response to customers. They have all adopted the principle of ruthless standardisation for their IT.

For the many thousands of companies that are not operating on such a huge scale, the concepts of flexibility and collaboration will still be recognisable – if a little scary. Opening up the organisation, becoming connected to external partners, and sharing internal information do not come naturally or easily to many companies – but they will be key characteristics of successful businesses in the internet age.

At a technology level, SAP is going for a big push on its latest customer relationship management (CRM) release, SAP CRM 2007.

Insiders at the supplier privately acknowledge that SAP’s previous CRM offering was maybe not as good is it could have been, but with the new product the firm hopes to better compete with Oracle / Siebel, as well as mid-market alternatives such as Microsoft. There seems to be a big internal push on making 2008 a successful year for CRM 2007 – so expect the sales rep to come knocking soon.

This was my fourth Sapphire, but my first for a few years. Overall, I would say this is one of the better IT vendor conferences – purely because SAP is very good at getting high-profile customers to speak about what they are doing and to share their experiences with their peers. Of course, if you want to delve into products and technologies, there’s every opportunity, but as an occasion to learn from IT leaders at some of the world’s top companies, it is a worthwhile way for any IT professional to spend a couple of days.

Oh, and Berlin has some pretty good bars too…