Premise

When we launched the SDN 4 years ago, we didn't quite know what to expect and whether we would be successful in creating a vibrant community. The line that we knew we had to keep was to enable you - our community - and to give you - our partners and customers - the opportunity to succeed with SAP software through SDN. And this can only be done by providing you with the collaborative online tools through our platform and by allowing you to address issues, to share your thoughts, to express your wishes, and in return to show you that we care.

Thanks to your contributions, your enthusiasm and your feedback, we have today two communities with more than 800,000 registered users that help each other, make projects successful, answer forum questions within a few minutes, build up FAQs, How-to papers or just hang out at Community days and TechEds in the SDN clubhouse (and drink tons of coffee at our expenses).

This is also the time to think of where the communities are heading and what more of value we can add. Seeing the original SDN as the stage 1.0 of our community network, the launch of the BPX community a year ago and the technical separation brought us to community version 2.0. Even though there were the occasional bumps, we still cannot believe seeing the communities working so well. Each day working with the community is differently enjoyable and remunerating. It would be wrong to sit back and just watch and get into a routine. We need to continue improving, to make your job easier and more fulfilled. And after all, though we all earn money with our work, we also want to keep this work fun and exciting.

Next stages of our community

What's next? How would the next stage of a maturing community network look like? We talked a lot to you, our users, partners, customers and analysts about how they see the SDN/BPX communities and what they would like being offered through the community network.

The overwhelming wish was something like a software subscription program, where you can subscribe to software for an annual fee for development, for testing and for evaluation.

Subscription program

Well, we complied, and bring you a very interesting program and - just to give you the full honest picture - the so far most sophisticated project for the colleagues on the community network and adjacent teams: we introduce the SDN NetWeaver Subscriptions program.

Through this subscription program we give you access to the full NetWeaver stack - for an annual and as we believe pretty reasonable subscription fee. When we say full NetWeaver stack, we really mean full. Developer Studio, Development Infrastructure, ABAP stack, BI, XI, MDM, Portal, VC etc. are all included. Once you subscribe, you'll not only get a box with the DVD ROMS, but also access to the Service Marketplace, the OSS, the Enterprise Services Workplace and the Virtual TechEd sessions, as well as some other goodies like premium presence in the forums.

This program is a signal to the changes the community faces. We are reaching out to the strongly growing segment of small and midsize partners, creating an opportunity to realize their business ideas in the SAP environment with SAP tools.

Feel free to register now, so that you are under one of the front runners in this program.

We need your opinion

And don't hesitate to give us your feedback. In fact, we welcome feedback about this program. Is this what you need? Is there something you'd want us to add to the program? Is there something that we screwed up? Let us know. Without you telling us, we won't know. You can directly email me, I take the task of listening to you and compiling your feedback.

But first: enjoy and discover the new program. Stay tuned for the next days...