I’m over at SAP’s TechEd 2006 conference in Amsterdam. SAP have decided to engage more with the blogger network, and so this is the first European show when they’ve invited at least 3 of the Enterprise Irregulars, along with some of my other blogging buddies and acquaintances as part of the press contingent at the show. I have to say it’s a slightly strange experience to be treated as a journalist, but this has been a great opportunity to get back in to understanding what SAP are doing. I see many echoes back to my time in IBM, with the corporate approach, the jargon and TLA filled language of the presentations, but I also see a significant change happening inside their company between old SAP, and the new SAP that is embracing disruptive ideas. Probably the most significant thing I’ve seen on the first day is SDN. Because I’ve been out of touch with the SAP ecosystem, before I arrived here I had no idea of what it was. If somebody had explained that it was the SAP Developer Network I would 
probably have dismissed it as just another forum - many products have some form of bulletin board for the users, and that kind of thing has been around even before the internet since Usenet in 1980, so nothing new here. What’s unique is the scale of the thing, and the way that SAP is embracing the changes it will bring. There are over 570,000 subscribers, it is completely open, and the core service is free - I’ve just joined this morning. You can ask any question you like, and there is passionate community, 94% of which aren’t SAP employees, who are willing to answer questions. As well as spreading their knowledge, and promoting their expert status, contributors are awarded with a points system, which gets them things like free entrance to TechEd (and badges!). There is a complementary service called BPX, or Business Process Expert community. This offers the same kind of facility, but aimed more at the business analyst and consultant community rather than developers, with around 50,000 members and only a little overlap with SDN.
probably have dismissed it as just another forum - many products have some form of bulletin board for the users, and that kind of thing has been around even before the internet since Usenet in 1980, so nothing new here. What’s unique is the scale of the thing, and the way that SAP is embracing the changes it will bring. There are over 570,000 subscribers, it is completely open, and the core service is free - I’ve just joined this morning. You can ask any question you like, and there is passionate community, 94% of which aren’t SAP employees, who are willing to answer questions. As well as spreading their knowledge, and promoting their expert status, contributors are awarded with a points system, which gets them things like free entrance to TechEd (and badges!). There is a complementary service called BPX, or Business Process Expert community. This offers the same kind of facility, but aimed more at the business analyst and consultant community rather than developers, with around 50,000 members and only a little overlap with SDN.
We met with Craig Cmehil, the evangelist for the community, as well Mark Finnern his boss, and Mark Yolton - the VP responsible for SDN. They explained that when this was first thought of 2 years ago some SAP insiders were very concerned over the way they would be opening themselves up, giving the customer set the opportunity to complain in public - the same kind of corporate mentality that blocks employees blogging in some companies. Thankfully, the more sensible view prevailed, that if there were problems the customers would talk to each other about them anyway, and so it would be better to see SDN as an opportunity to capture and solve these issues as they come up. The community has grown to this incredible size within 2 years. It used to be that you would get an answer within, on average, 3.5 hours, but that’s now down to 16 minutes! The community involves more than 600 bloggers, and most of the questions are answered by around 8,500 more expert members. They passed 1 million forum posts last week, and they are just implementing a wiki to help distil some of the answers in to FAQs. The SAP developers are also active members in the network, and often topic forum moderators, but significantly they’re being driven by and influenced by the ideas and needs expressed by the community. We were told there is a “tidal wave of change happening inside SAP”. You could certainly feel it at the SDN clubhouse, a sort of “unconference” going on within the show.
I don’t know if SAP will be able to handle the input they’ll begin to get from this community as it grows, but it is certainly impressive, and shows more of the agility you would expect from a much smaller company. One (or two) of SAP’s competitors, as well as many smaller software authors ought to take serious note.
Update: Mark Yolton highlighted in his comment that I’d missheard one of the things he said. Two thirds of the SDN bloggers aren’t SAP employees, and 94% of SDN members are customers, partners or public member - both very impressive metrics.
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