Day two at Sapphire started with something that SAP is good at – getting high-profile customers to speak at its conferences.

So much of these events is taken up with product-related information – obviously vital for users and prospective users – but even the most enthusiastic delegates would probably admit there is only so much detail you can take.

Hearing from a fellow customer though, is a different matter and is possibly the most valuable aspect of an event like this.

This morning we heard from two of SAP's biggest users.

John Clarke, chief information officer at Nokia, talked about the challenges of producing more than 300 million mobile phones every year in what has become one of the most diverse, demanding and rapidly changing markets in the world.

Clarke talked about the way that Nokia has been transformed in the last 10 years through IT, from a company where technology was holding back the business and causing great difficulties in its manufacturing and distribution, to one recognised as having one of the best supply chains in the world.

Another little snippet I liked was the diversity of the mobile phone market illustrated by the fact that in Africa, Nokia is starting to make handsets with a built-in torch, because African users find that a particularly useful feature to have.

In a recurrence of the theme emerging yesterday, Clarke's presentation highlighted again the benefit of ruthless standardisation – driving a global company through an adherence to a single standard version of its core business application.

That was echoed by the second customer speaker of the day – Paul McGarry, international vice president of global IT for manufacturing giant Colgate-Palmolive.

McGarry said that 99.6 per cent of the company runs on SAP, and highlighted the most important benefit as "taking complexity out of our IT."

While SAP may be pushing its own marketing messages, any delegate spending time listening to their peers here talking about the realities of their day-to-day work will be taking away plenty of food for thought about the reasons why they should be taking a similarly ruthless approach to simplifying and standardising their critical applications.

Footnote – One other interesting common aspect of Clarke and McGarry's presentations was the fact they are both Brits, running global IT operations for two important overseas-based organisations. It reflects well on the quality of IT leadership in the UK – something that all the UK IT profession should take pride in and shout out about a little more.