“We know the jour­ney has not always been easy,” SAP CEO Bill McDer­mott said in his keynote address on day 1 of SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence. ​“But when we lis­ten, under­stand, and act, we ful­fill our poten­tial as your trust­ed inno­va­tor. No com­pa­ny is per­fect, not even SAP. But we are focused on becom­ing the best run ver­sion of our­selves in the relent­less pur­suit of mak­ing you, our cus­tomers, the best run busi­ness­es in the world.”

It was a live­ly crowd over­flow­ing onto the show floor eager to hear about SAP’s new devel­op­ments and what it meant for their busi­ness­es. This year’s theme — the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence — was front and cen­ter in today’s announce­ments as well as on the show floor and edu­ca­tion ses­sions through­out the day.

More than 20,000 atten­dees expe­ri­enced the show and had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to give feed­back in real time through one of the many Qualtrics sur­vey sta­tions sit­u­at­ed through­out the con­fer­ence. They also had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make con­nec­tions that mat­ter and that will help dri­ve their busi­ness objec­tives forward.