Jeff Nolan, Who was a part of SAP Ventures (SAP's VC Company) & is now one of SAP's key strategists - He runs the Apollo Group, a strategy and communications organization with SAP.He is also a popular blogger , who had once said that his mission is to disrupt Oracle. While he is not disrupting Oracle, He has a started a new trend as a part of Sapphire 2006, he has set up a Bloggers Corner - part of the Press contingent of the event. And has invited a set of 10 bloggers. Thank you Jeff, would also like to thank Stacey Fish from the SAP marketing team who was a huge help working with me to iron out all the travel /logistics details.

List of Bloggers:

Jason Busch - Spend Matters
Zoli Erdos - Zoli's Blog
Ismael Ghalimi - IT Redux
Ross Mayfield - Ross Mayfield's Weblog
Vinne Mirchandani - Deal Architect
Parashanth Rai - CIO-Weblog
Ramana Rao - Information Flow
Niel Robertson - Parallax
Charlie Wood - Spanning Partner
Jason Wood - The Ponderings of Woodrow

(OPML Here)

Why do it? - Deal architect ,One of the bloggers invited to the bloggers corner has covered the point well at "The Changing Influence Game".
Excerpt "As the WSJ reported this week, "elite tech blogs" are emerging as another influence category. If you type Microsoft or Sun in Google's search engine you are likely to find 5 out of 10 hits take you to a blog not to a Forrester research note on a magazine article. The Google and Yahoo channels are also growing exponentially faster than the Forrester or the CMP channel. The recent Sony rootkit issue was spotted by a blogger. Ditto for Dell's customer service issues earlier this year. Not to suggest all blogs are negative. Many bloggers provide very fair assessment of market categories. Vendors need to reach out and influence key bloggers as much as they do analysts or traditional media"

An Event WIKI has been set up and is accessible here.

Prashanth Rai

Tag(s):SAPPHIRE06