The SAP ecosystem provides customers with a superior approach to addressing the unique challenges specific to their industries. It cultivates industry solutions and product roadmaps by bringing together customers, independent software vendors, system integrators, technology vendors and SAP to form a network of groups focused on fulfilling top-priority, high-value business and technology needs.
Examples of industry-focused capability include our Industry Value Network, where customers and partners work together to develop industry-leading solutions. We also have more than 500,000 members in our Business Process Expert Community, who share best practices, and more than 2,000 services partners who help deploy SAP solutions in specific industries.
SAP helps businesses thrive through the strength of its communities. These communities distinguish SAP as the leader in coordinating and harnessing the collective knowledge of all ecosystem participants to achieve results – fast – by interacting with others engaged in similar roles and tasks.
For example, developers can engage with more than 1.2 million other developers in the SAP Developer Network (SDN). This community has more than 6,000 postings every day on 200+ topics. Customers and partners interact in our Enterprise Services Community to create new service definitions that meet business requirements. SAP Business Objects customers and partners share insights and best practices in their own community. You can meet many of these and others in person to exchange ideas and best practices at SAP TechEd conferences.
The SAP ecosystem brings together diverse relationships and resources to help drive the next generation of solutions with SAP development efforts. For over 30 years and spanning 25 industry segments, the SAP ecosystem and partner network has yielded new insights and expanded competitive solutions for customers.
Partners play a critical role in establishing the SAP ecosystem advantage. Through applications such as SAP Solution Extensions, customers can tap into valuable offerings that easily integrate with SAP software, offering cross-solutions and cross-industry functionality that complement SAP solutions. And partners of all types can engage with the ecosystem through our SAP PartnerEdge programme, which recognises and rewards partners on the basis of value provided to customers.