THE SAP ECOSYSTEM

A WORLDWIDE NETWORK OF INNOVATION

When customers choose SAP, they get much more than just world-class business software. They also gain access to the largest ecosystem in the enterprise software industry, composed of software vendors, services companies, implementation partners, training partners, developers – and fellow customers.

» Diverse Participants. A Singular Focus.  

» SAP Partners: A “Who’s Who” of Technology

» Fostering Co-Innovation and Collaboration  

» Sharing Knowledge Among Users

» “A Thriving Economy in its Own Right ”  

Diverse Participants. A Singular Focus.

The SAP ecosystem is a complex, dynamic, and rapidly growing community that continues to strengthen our value to customers. It consists of a diverse network of partners, developers, business experts, and users who share a singular focus: Enhancing the value of SAP solutions.

SAP Partners: A “Who’s Who” of Technology

To encourage the development of complementary hardware and software solutions, SAP offers global and local partnership opportunities for every strategic business area and customer need. Our rich partner community covers such areas as business process outsourcing, content, education, hosting, services, software solutions, support, and technology. Its members include such technology leaders as Adobe, Cisco, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Research in Motion, and Sun Microsystems, as well as thousands of smaller organizations.

• SAP NetWeaver Partners
  The SAP NetWeaver technology platform allows our many partners to develop innovative products and services with con fidence that they will work seamlessly for tens of thousands of SAP customers. At the same time, it helps SAP increase revenues from the many vendors who license our technology platform for use in their applications. It is a win-win-win for our company, our partners, and especially our customers. The SAP NetWeaver community continues to gain momentum, with more than 2,000 independent software vendors (ISVs) currently building software for the SAP NetWeaver platform.
   
• Co-Innovation Lab
  In July 2007, the first SAP Co-Innovation Lab opened in Palo Alto, California. The first facility of its kind, SAP Co-Innovation Lab offers a hands-on environment for SAP, independent software vendors, system integrators, and technology partners to work together with customers around current and future technologies. And, it showcases how customers can increase competitive advantage and improve efficiencies by transforming their business networks with enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA).This lab initiated a number of solution co-innovation projects with its founding sponsors Cisco, HP, Intel, and NetApp.

Fostering Co-Innovation and Collaboration

To foster continuous co-innovation, collaboration, and ongoing improvement in a wide range of products, services, and business processes, SAP continues to foster various “communities of innovation” – highly interactive networks of developers, customers, and partners that come together to collaborate on a variety of topics. The major communities include:

• SAP Developer Network
  The SAP Developer Network (SDN), the largest of the SAP communities of innovation, enables members from more than 120 countries to co-innovate in a robust, highly collaborative environment. SDN includes discussion forums, blogs, wikis, software, and tools downloads, and e-learning. The collective expertise of thousands of technologists and thousands of technical assets drive more than half a million visitors to SDN every month. Having reached a milestone of one million members in 2007, the network is so active that a member who submits a question will typically receive a response from a fellow member in just under 20 minutes.
   
• Business Process Expert Community
  The Business Process Expert community is the largest business process community in the world, with more than 225,000 members covering 26 industries. This community drives process innovation through collaboration, best-practices sharing, and collective learning. Its participants include industry experts, business analysts, application consultants, IT managers, and enterprise architects, who engage in moderated forums, collaborative wikis, and expert blogs.
   
• Industry Value Networks
  Industry Value Networks continue to thrive across 13 industries including aerospace and defense, automotive, banking, chemicals, consumer products, high tech, oil and gas, public sector, retail, mill products (forest and paper), mining, travel and transportation, and utilities. Industry Value Networks bring together independent software vendors, systems integrators, and technology vendors with SAP and customers from various industries. Together, these participants work to solve customers’ most pressing business challenges through the creation and improvement of industry-relevant business processes.
   
  
• Enterprise Services Community
  The Enterprise Services (ES) Community enables customers, partners, and SAP to form collaborative groups focused on developing enterprise service specifications for business process platforms. This community currently has over 250 members and 30 active community definition groups.

Sharing Knowledge Among Users

To share knowledge and influence SAP development efforts, our customers have established “users’ groups” in regions around the world. Two of the largest of these are the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG), with more than 50,000 members, and the Deutschsprachige SAP-Anwendergruppe (DSAG), with 23,000 members. In the past, there was little interaction among the SAP users’ groups across regions. In 2007, however, SAP initiated a program in which all users’ groups could share knowledge and organizational best practices with one another. This new approach has led to an energetic new conversation that will benefit the entire SAP ecosystem.

“A Thriving Economy in its Own Right ”

In the strongest evidence yet that its ecosystem strategy is delivering real value to customers, partners and developers, the independent analyst firm IDC has declared the SAP ecosystem “a thriving economy in its own right”. According to the IDC report, “The recent rise of SAP as the leading enterprise applications vendor across multiple customer and product categories has created a booming economy whereby an increasing number of developers and resellers are jockeying for the attention of the market leader and its installed base of more than 41,000 customers.”