So here we are at Las Vegas, at SAP TechEd 2008. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. My name is Aaron Williams. I'm Vice President of Co-Innovation Engineering Americas and the Enterprise Services Community for SAP. It's a long title, but it's part of the Global Ecosystem Partner Group here, working with partners and customers so that they can engage better with SAP. What's the new environment that you guys have come out with? The new thing is Collaboration Workspace. It's a new dimension to collaboration that SAP's come up with in the last six months. It enables partners and customers to work with SAP in private collaboration rooms using all of the Web 2.0 technologies that we're familiar with. It adds two dimensions that aren't available on SDNBPX today. The first is privateness, so we can bring together customers and partners in an area that's not public like SDNBPX. And the second is it's an enterprise-aware. So whereas SDNBPX, you're participating as an individual, within Collaboration Workspace, you're participating as a member of a company. And that's really important when it comes to the kind of programs that we have here at SAP, which are really on the forefront of engaging in ecosystem. We care about whether you participate on behalf of a company because of the legal agreements that happen between your company and my company, for instance. Right. We want to make sure that everybody around the table has the same rules and is following the same rules. What are the sorts of things that people come together to collaborate on? What are they using it for? A few examples. First, Enterprise Services Community is one of the programs that I run. We bring together partners and customers to define Enterprise Services. And that goes all the way down to the WSDL level. So we define very clear specifications for Enterprise Services. In order to do that, you need to first identify use cases and then go through a process of prioritizing them and figuring out what business objects are needed. And then creating the services is kind of the last step. Throughout this entire structured process, we use the unstructured collaboration of Collaboration Workspace through things like wiki documents and blog postings and discussion forums to be able to create these specifications. And these groups that we have will run six to nine months. And at the end, they'll have a very nice specification that SAP can go off and implement. Another example is Customer Value Network. This is something that was created by the field to enable customers that are going through similar upgrades or installs to be able to share best practices and share their experiences.
2:04Right. Not something you'd feel comfortable doing in a public website. But if you bring those customers together in a private area, then they can really learn a lot from each other as they go through the process. Before, I mean, before we could have sort of like virtual workspaces. Yeah. How would people get together to collaborate before? It was almost all done through email and exchanges through face-to-face meetings and things like this. Okay. Which works. I mean, you can get a good result out of that. But not nearly as high-quality results if you use these new Web2.0 technologies. Right. Which are more engaged. For instance, whereas we used to send an email of a document around the people. And then when they made changes, they'd have to send it back around. And then you always wondered whether you had the latest version or not. Uh-huh. Using Collaboration Workspace, it has full version control. So we can always see what the latest version is. We can also see who's made what edits as you go through the process. Right. Which is huge value to these groups. So you have these people working together who could be competing with each other or who have, like you're saying, private information. And I mean, it's easy enough to have like a private workspace somewhere or a wiki or whatever to go work on it. But like how else does, I mean, does SAP help out the other concerns? Well, this is actually one of the key points. Because the Collaboration Workspace in and of itself is really not that unique. It's a bunch of commoditized technologies like wiki and blogs and forums. But it's the programs that SAP has that are built on top of Collaboration Workspace, that use Collaboration Workspace, that make it unique. The Enterprise Services community, for instance, is what draws people in to use these new tools. And the Enterprise Services community, as an example, has this kind of governance and this kind of spirit of collaboration. The people that are there aren't there to share their unique innovations. Right. They're there to share the stuff that they want SAP to implement, which is all the stuff that has already been commoditized across their industry anyway. So it's kind of a sort of a product management, a requirements pipeline for SAP. Exactly. It's a little bit deeper than that, right? Right. Because we actually go to the space of actually creating the specifications, not just the requirements. Yeah. But because the people around the table are not coming and saying, "I want this new whiz-bang thing from SAP." That's the stuff they're doing. Yeah. What they do want, though, is the underlying platform to support their new whiz-bang thing. So in that regard, we don't see the same kind of frustration or competition as you do within the public. We came out with the first version of this at Sapphire in Orlando in May.
4:06So it's only been a few months now that we've had it out there. We've already grown to more than 6,500 users across more than 550 different companies, actively engaged across 16 different programs. Yeah. So the scalability of this in terms of the interest and the opportunity for us to engage is really high. Right. The first step for us was to get as many different stakeholder programs using this as possible because that really proved the value of the underlying platform. Uh-huh. We've got those 16 different programs using it. That's a great next step. Now for Q4, what we're really going to be focused on is integrating existing applications or solutions that are out there into collaboration workspace. It's got a plug-in architecture. And, like, what are those types of applications? Yeah. So one example is meetings. Uh-huh. So right now we have this great way of doing collaboration online, but we also have to do face-to-face meetings still. Yeah. Or even, you know, WebEx type meetings. So we're working to integrate Adobe Connect into collaboration workspace. Oh, okay. So it's easy to schedule a meeting with the people that are private to that group. Easy to take the results of the meeting, like the presentations and the notes and the recording of the meeting and push it back into collaboration workspace for people that couldn't make the meeting. Right. So that's one example of an integration where we're taking advantage of, you know, other collaboration means and pushing them into collaboration workspace. Another good example is there's a company called Entheosis that has these things called innovation games where they bring together customers and partners in a more fun way to produce specific results. Traditionally, when we wanted to do prioritization, we'd give people a list and we'd say rank these one to ten and then we'd take everybody's list and we'd add up all the numbers and figure out, okay, which is the most important and which was the least important, which was interesting. But it didn't give us the kind of background information like why did they think this was really important? Yeah, yeah. Why did they think this one was unimportant? Through this innovation game called buy a feature, what you do is you take that same list and you assign a relative dollar value for how much you think it would cost to implement that feature. Yeah. Then you give everybody around the table some fake money and you say, okay, now I want you guys to talk to each other and figure out which features you want to buy. And you never give them enough money to buy any one feature. So they have to turn to the guy next to them and say, hey, I really want feature number two. If you chip in 20 bucks, I'll chip in 20 bucks and we'll buy feature number two.
6:08And then the funny thing is the guy next to them says, I don't care about feature number two because it doesn't have this, this and this. I really care about feature number four because it does this for me. They've taken a version of this game now and put it online. We're integrating that into collaboration workspace. So now any of those 16 programs that want to do a prioritization can use this new tool or this new program for doing prioritization. Well, is there anything else you wanted to mention before we take a look at it? No, I don't think so. Let's jump in. Okay. Yeah, we'll take a look at it.