SAP's communities of innovation create value for our customers as they develop strategy, establish business processes, engineer technologies, deploy solutions – even as they conduct ongoing daily operations.

To deliver this value, SAP orchestrates an ecosystem of business persons, developers, and IT services professionals who span business strategy, business processes, technology, and operations. Within the ecosystem, customers co-innovate and partners collaborate to achieve results that test cost, time, and expertise limitations in everyday business. While unified by shared business goals, communities are fluid enough to ensure that information is dynamic, agile, and accessible.

SAP communities of innovation distinguish SAP as the leader in coordinating and harnessing the collective power of developers, partners, customers, business process experts and others integral to the shared success of each community. Collectively, SAP communities of innovation work seamlessly and collaboratively to usher in the new era of service-oriented architecture.

SAP Communities of Innovation

SAP offers a variety of communities and resources to enable customers, partners, and individuals to connect and collaborate.

Collaboration Among Individuals

• Business Process Expert (BPX) community – Bridges the gap between business and IT by engaging diverse members in moderated forums, Wikis, and expert blogs to drive process innovation through collaboration, best-practice sharing, and collective learning.
• SAP Developer Network (SDN) – Enables over one million members to co-innovate in a robust, highly collaborative environment using discussion forums, blogs, Wikis, software and tools downloads, e-learning, and specially designed programs.
• Diamond technical community – Provides a variety of sites with resources that can help members develop solutions using software from Business Objects, an SAP company. Members receive free trial downloads, training and certification, and the latest information from the community's developer conference.

Collaboration Among Companies

• Industry Value Network program – Brings together leading-edge independent software vendors (ISVs), technology vendors, and systems integrators (SIs) with SAP and customer companies. Industry Value Network groups focus on information sharing to enable superior innovation and multivendor alignment of business, development, and go-to-market plans.
• Enterprise Services Community (ES Community) – Enables more than 300 leading customers and partners to collectively define the next generation of enterprise services, which SAP builds and then makes available to our entire ecosystem of partners and customers.
• Industry standards – Ensures that SAP's platform is open and interoperable with other vendor solutions in heterogeneous IT environments. Industry standards are a way that SAP engages with the industry more broadly on industry, business process, and infrastructure matters to ensure openness – focusing less on standards and more on SAP initiatives to collaborate with multiple companies.

Offline Collaboration

• SAP Co-Innovation Lab – Offers a hands-on environment where SAP, customers, and partners come together to innovate, accelerate, and showcase new business solutions and technologies.
• SAP TechEd – Premier training event that provides the opportunity for physical connection and collaboration between customers, partners, consultants and developers in an interactive setting.