Final LogiChem 2007 Thoughts and pointer to the Microsoft and SAP Alliance site

I can't believe a week has already passed since LogiChem ended.  I am still catching up on things after being out most of last week.  I enjoyed all of my conversations with customers and partners - it was a great time.  As Marc mentioned in the previous post, I kicked things off on Day 2 with a short talk about Microsoft's focus in the chemical industry, particularly around supply chain.  I talked a little bit about our partnership with SAP.  As a follow up, you can get to our Microsoft-SAP alliance website by visiting https://www.microsoft.com/isv/sap/.  The topic of how Microsoft can help our customers maximize the value they get our of their SAP investments, is a pretty lengthy and meaty topic - and not a topic you can do justice with in opening remarks.  Take a look, and feel free to ask us any questions on the thread, or direct to us.  We are happy to help.

I enjoyed the RFID session at the conference with Boeing, Dow, and EPCGlobal - they showcased some leading edge RFID adoption and gave a view of where the chemical industry could benefit.  We had a lot of questions about our newly released BizTalk Server 2006 R2 with its RFID capabilities.  I posted about it earlier, so I won't rehash, but I really do think it will have a lot of value for chemical companies who are experimenting with RFID.

One area we showed a demonstration around was doing supply chain performance & optimization using our business intelligence platform including the newly released PerformancePoint Server 2007 and a partner application from LeadTime Technology.  This demo had a lot of interest around the booth.  We showed how chemical companies can integrate performance management across the functions to get the full view of performance, and be able to make quick decisions to optimize their supply chain.  Really cool and leading edge stuff.

-Brian Willson