On Wednesday morning, the first day of SAPPHIRE NOW and the second day of TechEd in Madrid, Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO of SAP, took the stage to deliver his keynote address. As in the past, Snabe gave a type of “state-of-the-union” speech, in which he discussed the current position of SAP and its future goals.

Around 10,000 SAP TechEd and SAPPHIRE NOW conference-goers attended the keynote in Madrid, and another 15,000 people tuned in online. If audience members happened to have been present at the first keynote of SAPPHIRE NOW in May, they would have recognized the introductory monologue delivered today by Irish actor Gabriel Byrne. We reported on his dramatic speech last May in our article, “Not Your Grandfather’s SAPPHIRE”, and his introduction once again focused on the future of technology, or rather, how technology will dictate the future.

But the similarities end there. In May, SAP had not yet announced a single application that runs on SAP HANA and was still talking about the SAP Store in hypothetical terms. Today, as Snabe reported, there are several implementation scenarios for SAP HANA now available, and the SAP Store houses over 70 solutions. In short, “SAP has become Apple simple and Google fast,” as one SAP customer said to Snabe.

Keep reading to find out about the other advances SAP has made in the past six months. On the following pages, we’ll cover these topics:

• Core: Business Suite 7 i2011 now in ramp up
• Cloud: Extend Business ByDesign with SAP Store
• Mobile: 30 mobile apps released so far this year
• In-memory: HANA is a hit