The pillars of the SAP communities of innovation include the following.
SAP Developer Network
The SAP Developer Network (SDN), the largest of the SAP communities of innovation, enables more than 900,000 members from more than 120 countries to co-innovate in a robust, highly collaborative environment. SDN includes discussion forums, blogs, a wiki, 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. The community now offers the SDN subscriptions program that enables developers, software architects, and consultants to purchase an annual development license for the SAP NetWeaver technology platform.
Business Process Expert Community
The Business Process Expert community is the largest business process community in the world, with more than 200,000 members covering 26 industries driving process innovation through collaboration, best-practice sharing, and collective learning. Industry experts, business analysts, application consultants, IT managers, and enterprise architects engage in moderated forums, collaborative wikis, and expert blogs. The community collaborates across boundaries, shares ideas, develops and refines business processes, and leverages the benefits of enterprise SOA and new, model-driven approaches to application development.
Industry Value Networks
Industry value networks (IVNs) are industry-specific business groups that bring together leading-edge, independent software vendors (ISVs), technology vendors, and systems integrators (SIs) with SAP and customer companies. IVNs focus on priority industry needs and opportunities – solving pressing customer business challenges through strong network collaboration. Members share and mutually profit from combined industry and domain expertise, resources, solutions, best practices, as well as services of the network. IVNs focus on information sharing to enable superior innovation and multivendor alignment of business, development, and go-to-market plans.
Enterprise Services Community
Enterprise Services Community of more than 250 leading customer and partner companies comes together to define the next generation of relevant enterprise services, which SAP builds and then makes available to ourl ensures that the enterprise services repository contains the most targeted and useful enterprise services to address customers' vital business process platform needs. Get more information at SAP Developer Network (SDN).
Rapid solution development members engage in four key aspects of service identification and definition:
Identify new-use cases where new enterprise services would be valuable.
Prioritize the use cases to determine where SAP will commit development resources.
Define details of the enterprise services through community definition groups.
Showcase how to use the services after they are released.
Industry Standards
The Industry Standards initiative helps to ensure that SAP's platform is open and interoperable with other vendor solutions in heterogeneous IT environments. Today, interoperability is one of the most challenging issues facing enterprises. It is hard to predict what kinds of systems will form a company's business network in the future. The best way to hedge against this challenge is through industry standards. Working closely with companies in the SAP ecosystem, SAP leads initiatives in business semantic standards (UN/CEFACT), the banking industry, Web services interoperability, and open source support (OSS). Get more information at SAP Developer Network (SDN).
Benefits of industry standards occur only if you take a comprehensive approach that places equal importance on:
Business semantics standards – Define the information flowing through and between enterprise applications
Technology standards – Enable systems running those enterprise applications to more easily connect and communicate
Open source – Provide SAP customers with a choice of technology platforms to use
