SAP is launching a community site that it hopes will
extend its footprint in the enterprise.
The new business-process expert community is geared to relatively
non-technical users and reflects the growing importance of business process
management and business process optimization within enterprises.
“This is a community for people who straddle IT and the business units they
serve,” Mark Yolton, vice president of SAP community programs, told
internetnews.com.
Yolton said that the new community site will be valuable to less advanced
developers who in many cases fill those new roles.
“Someone who is not a coder can customize and configure applications to
deliver the same services and business processes,” he said.
Yolton said that the site, quietly introduced fewer than four months ago,
already has 30,000 members providing best practices and expertise
on designing, developing, deploying and optimizing business processes.
“This is part of our strategy of working with a large ecosystem of partners,
developers and software providers to build on SAP’s platform,” said Yolton.
SAP launched a more technically oriented community for software developers
in October 2003.
That community currently numbers approximately half a million users, and SAP
expects its new site to attract at least as many members.
The new roles that SAP is seeking to attract through the site have been spawned in large part by the growing acceptance of SOA
Yolton said SAP hopes it will attract a new pool of potential
users by tapping into this trend.
“We hope it will attract businesses that are not SAP customers to consider
SAP as a platform and consider working with us going forward,” he said, adding the site should also help extend the company’s footprint within enterprises that have already implemented SAP.
Sheryl Kingstone, an analyst at the Yankee Group, said this was a way for
SAP to replicate the open source environment.
“Specialists and consultants outside their ecosystem can build pieces of
functionality they could resell or share with other customers,” she said.
Yolton noted that the forums are not uniquely for SAP tools.
“It is not a SAP-only community,” he said. “There are SAP-oriented tools, but it’s open to anyone who wants to join and participate.”