Community Potluck party, the SAP recipe

Chip Rodgers, Vice President and COO, SAP Community Network and Ecosystem Events at SAP  is the symphony master of the orchestra of SAP Community initiatives tells us the formula of this hidden submarine that silently and invisibly propels SAP’s strategies with a military precision and a gigantic scope.

How is SAP's community focus positioned in company's overall strategic framework? What gets most spotlight - developers, partners, users?

SAP Community Network (SCN) is a collaborative environment that delivers a wide breadth of knowledge, insight and rich content about SAP solutions and services, in a way that encourages optimized technology solutions, best-run business practices, and accelerated innovation.   SCN expands beyond a place to solve problems into a powerful source of all the information you need to be successful in the world of SAP, despite the job function or role. Every day, SCN changes the way thousands of SAP users work.  It deepens the connections with peers and makes the SAP product solutions easier to evaluate, install, run and use. This groundbreaking online business-to-customer community provides orchestrated connections into a dynamic community of SAP customers, partners, employees and experts by helping one another solve problems, learn, and invent new ways to get things done – faster.

How active and interesting is it in India?

India is very active in SAP Community Network.  In fact, of the over 200 countries and 2.5 million members, India has the third largest population of members following a very close second after Germany.  (US has the largest population.)

- SAP Community Network continues to invest in India as a key audience for growth in the community.  For example, in October, the SAP TechEd India event was the largest SAP TechEd event ever — with over 10,000 attendees. 

Has it been leveraged for R&D or future product feedback or apps significantly? How has SAP reacted to all the maintenance and support (and slow product roadmap) complaints that have come from the user communities?

SAP IdeaPlace is part of the SCN community with active engagement from our community members.  IdeaPlace provides a place for community members to contribute ideas directly to SAP product management teams and have the community vote for the best ideas, contribute comments to fine-tune them.  Our product management teams have actively engaged and adopted hundreds of ideas that are now in product roadmaps.

Any latest highlights on ASUG and its role in SAP's latest portfolio?

SAP has a long, active, and close relationship with ASUG, the SUGEN organization, as well as other SAP user group organizations throughout the world.  The SCN team has worked directly with ASUG over a number of years for active participation in our SAP TechEd US events where ASUG provides over 100 hours of content contributed by customer volunteers at the event.  ASUG and other SAP user groups are dedicated to providing a forum for members to influence software development at SAP, exchange ideas and best practices, and establish future priorities.  We have a collaborative and engaging partnership working to advancing the software industry.

How should one interpret Jive BI's entry or use of social apps for ERP in this territory?

SAP works with Jive Software very closely on a number of initiatives including supporting our internal collaboration technology as well as being the foundation for the new platform being deployed in early 2012 for SAP Community Network. However, I am unfamiliar with any offerings from Jive in the BI space.

Where does SAP stand in this initiative area in view of groups like Encompass, HP Interex EMEA and ITUG from HP?

SAP Community Network supports our customers and partners including HP and others.  SAP Community Network is an open community where we welcome all contributors, questions, answers, best practices, as well as those seeking search-based solutions to challenges in their environment that others have solved previously.