Shai Agassi on Community Value

Shai Agassi held a private Q&A after his keynote.  Of interest to me was his comments on their largest online community, the Software Developer Network:

500,000 visitors per month.  Aggregation of knowledge that is second to none.  slashdot for SAP.  SIs in India are hiring them 500 people at a time and saying for their first three months they are supposed to participate in SDN.  Aggregation and knowledge and self-categorization has created an environment where you know the guy who is giving advice may have a point ranking that shows they don't have a life, but a lot of knowledge.  We are contributing perhaps 20% of the content.  Average time from Q&A is less than 30 minutes, I wish our support channels were that effective.

I hear that Q&A through formal channels it's a day and a half, and probably at a cost for $85 to $245 per incident).  Step back and think about it for a moment.  It's the value proposition of a public community interface to an enterprise.  In this case, it is for software developers.  But what would happen if community was broadened to the whole ecosystem?

Shh...it's under construction here.

Comments

[Mark Yolton]

It's gratifying (and unusual in most companies and roles) to have your esteemed president be your most ardent and vocal supporter and megaphone into the marketplace. It's even better to be picked-up in a forum like this one, by an independent blogger and thought leader. One gentle gripe for Ross: You forgot to link to SDN, SAP's Developer Network. So, I'll do it here ... http://sdn.sap.com

I'll also let Ross's followers in on a (not so) secret... SAP is expanding on its great success with the developer community by offering a sneak preview into a soon-to-be-launched community for business process experts. Those people are the business analysts, solution consultants, application consultants, and others with similar titles who typically straddle IT and a Line of Business (LOB) to turn process models into software application behavior thru configuration and similar activities. See the full explanation at the sneak-preview site at http://bpx.sap.com

And it's off to a strong start: great feedback from ASUG and Sapphire attendees cornered at lunch or in the elevator. In just 5 days with no real announcements other than small group discussions and 1:1 conversations, exactly 2,699 people already signed-up to be members of this new BPX community.

SAP "gets" community... and Business Process Experts will be a big, influential community -- influential on SAP and in the marketplace of ideas.