SAP SAPPHIRE Now 2016, the annual SAP user conference in Orlando, closed last week and as per usual there were a number of announcements related to what is coming in the world of SAP in the next 12 months.

Day 1

Every year, the conference kicks off with keynotes from the SAP leadership team and probably the first time in recent memory the keynote over ran by at least 40 minutes. Up first was CEO Bill McDermott and it really was all about 'Customer', infact SAP has a whole new mantra Live Business and they coupled that with a key message of Run Live.

Day 2

Day two of SAP Sapphire 2016 began with a keynote from Robert Enslin, president of SAP's Global Customer Operations. Again the messaging was very HANA heavy with Enslin explaining how companies of all sizes are transforming with SAP S/4HANA as the digital core on the SAP HANA Platform.

The second day of SAPPHIRE also brought us more information on the new SAP finance mobile app, SAP RealSpend. It's a cloud based mobile app, which helps cost center managers improve decision making about budgets and spend.

SAP also previewed their first data-as-a-service offering called Digital Customer Insights. Which it created and designed to deliver insights that can be bought from the SAP store online. 

SAP says that the data is both anonymised and encrypted so that individual privacy is protected.

Day 3

Very much worth a watch from the final day is the legendary Prof. Hasso Plattner. Who spoke at SAPPHIRE NOW about the road to SAP S/4HANA, the next generation of business applications and machine learning.

Also coming to light was $18 million cash investment in Castlight Health. Castlight will be one of the initial participants in SAP's Connected Health platform, which also was launched at the conference and will run on SAP's HANA platform.

A few of the other big announcements from SAPPHIRE Now 2016 included:

• SAP and Microsoft announced joint plans to deliver broad support for the SAP HANA platform deployed on Microsoft Azure
• SAP to deliver data-as-as-service with Sybase 365
• Lenovo announces new SAP partnerships, offerings at SAPPHIRE NOW 
• Office 365 coming to SAP HANA
• SAP Partners with UPS to Build 3D Printing Network