We are at SAP TechEd 2008, and would you like to introduce yourself, special guest? I think I could. The name is Craig Schmayhill, and I am the community evangelist for the SAP Developer Network, which is SAP's mega development community...I mean, I'll give you the marketing spiel. We got like 1.4 million registered users, 6,000 messages daily, 15 to 20 weblogs a day, and like 11,000 wiki pages created. And you have the classic developer community, the BPX community, and now the business objects community, right? Yeah. Is that all of them now? No, we've got a couple others. We've got the IVN, which is the Industry Valley Networks, we've got the ESC, which is the Enterprise Services Community, and we've got at least two or three others, but they all range in size from one of them is like 20 people, and it's like an advisory board, all the way up to SDN being the largest with over a million users by itself. The Clubhouse actually, though, started in 2004 in San Diego, so this is the fifth year of having a Clubhouse in the U.S. Europe will be the fifth year as well, and then India will be the fourth year. All right. So we've had a lot of experience with the Clubhouse, we've done a lot of different things. We think we have a model that works this year because we've got, I guess, more or less a true representation of the ecosystem. Yeah. Because it's not just SDN, it's not just BPX, it's all of them together. And it's a little bit of marketing stuff, it's a little bit of customer stories and things like that. But at the same time, we've got a demand for that. Even from our hardcore developers, they're like, well, who else is doing this? Right. And so the Clubhouse is more or less what we refer to as the physical representation of our online community. And this is where all the guys come together. You know, we've had comments from, can I just come to the Clubhouse? I get more value from the Clubhouse than anywhere else to, you know, as long as it's not one of those SAP mentors giving a hands-on session, I want to come to the Clubhouse to talk to them to, wow, after going to 20 of the hands-on sessions, I wanted to come down to the Clubhouse
2:04and talk to a bunch of my other colleagues who were here going to 20 others. And 20 is an exaggeration. I think most people will get about six or seven, you know, in a week. Because, I mean, some of them are two or three hours long. And they use the Clubhouse as the central meeting point to then exchange notes. So you get five guys from the same company, and they just disperse in different directions and then concentrate in the Clubhouse to then share all of what they've learned that day and the whole week and everything like that. Right. It's also a nice place to hang out is one of the things you're getting at. Oh, totally. Instead of having to, as we can see in the background, just sit in the conference hallway. You know, a lot of people say, well, you know, the hallway is where the hallway demos take place. Right. Well, that's what we set up the Clubhouse for. You know. Exactly. It's got a perfect environment. Plus, it's got Wi-Fi. It's got coffee. It's got couches and chairs. And plugs. It's like the hallway con. That's what it is. It's the hallway con inside of a room. Since last year. I mean, what would you say in the community, like the new things that have been going on? One, which Red Monk is sponsoring this year, is the Rich Internet Application Hacker Night. Now, last year we threw it together, very last minute. You know, it was like two, three weeks before the event started. And we had like 25, 30 people show up. And that's all we really planned for. It was an instant success. I mean, this is SAP showing brand new UI technologies. Adobe showing brand new UI technologies. And now we've got, this year we've got Red Monk there helping lend support with information, looking into the RIA world. And we've got CogHeads showing up to show some of the interesting stuff they've done with RIA and SAP. And, I mean, this is stuff that's not even approved for public consumption. But, you know, we got total approval to show the SAP stuff here. And, you know, Adobe's going to give us deep peeks at Genesis and other stuff that they're working on. So, I mean, it's, I guess you could call it like the nerd location to be Wednesday night is come to Hacker Night. It's pizza and beer type environment, but it's hands-on. You know, we're going to do a couple demos, and then we're going to go hands-on.
4:05And people are going to actually try stuff out. So, that's one of the big things that we've picked up this year. And we've decided we're expanding it to every little bit. In the online world of the community, like how big do you think, how much involvement is there in RIA stuff? Like is it an interesting topic, or how's that working out? You know, it's a constant topic. You know, it started, we had stuff on PHP, Perl, and Python, and Ruby. You know, the open source connectors for these four languages are inside the community being discussed. Piers Harding, who created three of the four, did it all through the community. It got direct interaction with the RFC library folks inside of SAP through the community. So, we've had a constant presence around these types of languages and these types of technologies. And what we've noticed and seen is a drastic increase from 2006 into 2007 with widget-type technology. And from 2007 to 2008, we're seeing more and more of the richer widget-type environment. Air is coming up. Flex is there. Flash stuff is coming in. The widget stuff is getting more and more complex. We're seeing things that are being done with widgets that, you know, frankly, I think two years ago, nobody would have thought possible. And we're seeing that constantly inside the community. Number-wise, we're not huge. We're definitely not huge. But it's constant growth. So, what are people using those widgets or IA things for? I mean, what do you see them doing with it? We've got widgets that are connected to the BI platforms, to the business intelligent platform, pulling data out of, like, sales data. And so, I mean, are they making, like, graphs and charts or, like? Graphs, charts, but it's not only the graph charts aspect. It's the idea that you get an initial piece and then you can drill down into each individual piece. It's a sales guy in the field and he's not sure what he needs or he needs the data, but he doesn't want to take, you know, mountains of paperwork with him or something like that. He's got a widget now that he can work with. Right. And he drills in. He says, okay, West Coast, boom. You know, these types of sales, boom, boom, boom, boom. And all of a sudden, inside of his meeting, on his mobile device, you know, or his iPhone, mobile device, laptop, or wherever, he's getting the drill down data that he needs without going through the complicated process of logging into the system, pulling this report, generating that report, or anything like that.
6:18They're making it easier for these guys to do what they do. Other things that have been happening, they created a, from the BPX side, they created a book. Right. This process first, and they did it all inside of the wiki environment. I mean, completely inside of the wiki environment. So, they wrote the book there. It's now available. You can download the PDF for free from Amazon and all of this. We've got a profile area where we're helping people. I mean, a community of 1.4 million people. All of a sudden, how do you find one person? So, we've got this whole profile set up where we're at. And are those like the business cards or? It's kind of like the business card, but what we decided was we want to give them free form. We'll give them a template, but we want to give them free form. So, we use the wiki. Right. And they get a free form environment to create basically. It's like the old GeoCities of old. You know, you get your own little personal home page. Yeah. Now, what we've done, though, is because not everybody's comfortable with navigating the wiki, is we created an air app to do it for them. Oh, right, right, right. So, we linked all this. So, the air app, we're actually going to release the entire project archive to the community for them to work on. And, you know, as we realized, we didn't create a profile viewer. We created a wiki navigation system. And tying the air and the flex and the, you know, the RI technologies, we're tying them into practical uses of our own environment, but not necessarily our own technology. Right. So, we're seeing various different offshoots. You know, we're seeing people use it. You know, we're seeing flex widgets created for countdown timers for SAP, you know, tech ed events. And then, all of a sudden, somebody goes, well, God, I can do that for other stuff. We've got this point recognition system. A lot of people, you know, a lot of people are like, well, I don't know, points and all this. But, you know what? It's a great way of tracking some friendly competition. Right. Activity, it seems like. Activity. And it's also a great indicator for somebody like me who's got such a broad area. I mean, there's like 85 topics that I've got to keep my eye on. And it's a great way for me to track increases, spikes in activity.
8:20And lulls in activity. And what we decided to do was we're going to take those points. We're going to stick them in a bucket for the year. And if we reach certain levels, 2.5 million, 3.5 million, we're going to give a set amount of money to the World Food Program. First milestone, 2.5 million. We're going to give $100,000 or euro or dollars. It's $100,000. We're going to give it to the World Food Program. So, in Berlin, you know, I think we've hit the 2.5 now. But, you know, I always like to wait a week or two to see how things level out. You know, because sometimes it's, you know, something was, you know, points were there. But then the person decides, you know what, I didn't like it, so I'm going to remove it. Oh, right, right. You know, it's like in the wiki. You know, you create a whole wiki area and then you say, you know what, not what I wanted. Let's get rid of it and start again. And with the wiki environment, it's easy to do. So, you know, I always like to wait a week or two to see things level out. But it looks very, very promising for that. So, we're pretty excited. Well, that's great. Well, thanks for getting us updated on what's been happening. Yeah, thank you.