SAPPHIRE 2006, Day Zero — I am in Orlando, Florida, joining a team of a dozen bloggers invited by SAP to cover the event. The deal is pretty simple: SAP provides flights, hotel rooms, meals, and conference passes. Bloggers contribute their time. We are free to write anything we want as long as we remain fair and balanced, and SAP gets a right to respond on our blogs if we write something that is critical of the company. Fair deal.

As far as I can tell, this is the first time a large company sponsors a group of bloggers to cover a major event and gives them access to corporate executives for one-on-one interviews, in much the same way traditional press people get taken care of. We have our own blogger corner in the press room, wear conference passes that identify us as bloggers, and most of us stay in the same hotel, making it easier to know each other better than through the reading of our respective blogs (OPML Feed):

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

Congratulations to Jeff Nolan and Mike Prosceno for having made this possible. As Niel Robertson pointed out, it would be surprising if Oracle does not follow SAP’s lead regarding this type of initiative. And many thanks to Stacey Fish for having taken care of all the logistics for the event. Great job!