Chapter SIX. The Enterprise Services Community

No software company would ever claim that it is single-handedly able to meet every one of its customers' requirements. Instead, software companies work closely with systems integrators (SIs), consultants, hardware suppliers, and the customers themselves both formally and informally to jointly specify and develop extensions, modifications, and new versions of existing software products that can meet customers' evolving needs.

SAP happens to be one of the few software companies today that has the scale and resources to design and build software platforms that serve as the focus of activity for thousands of other companies and, arguably, millions of people. One of the reasons these vibrant ecosystems work is that SAP leverages a wide range of contributions to the benefit of everyone. SAP achieves this through the input of a highly valuable community of customers, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), and other entities in the IT marketplace. SAP interacts with them through several important engagement models, including the PartnerEdge program, customer influence councils, Industry Value Networks, and now the Enterprise Services Community (ES-Community).

With the ES-Community for ESA, SAP is embarking on its most ambitious effort yet: to foster and engage with this broad ecosystem around enterprise services. SAP recognizes that for ESA to achieve its full potential as an architecture for developing new IT solutions quickly and in alignment with fast-changing business processes and strategies, the SAP ecosystem has to work more effectively than ever. Therefore, SAP has formalized the ES-Community to ensure rapid and focused innovation around ESA.

The ES-Community process is the mechanism for the diverse SAP ecosystem to provide input into the definitions of planned enterprise services, giving customers and partners direct access to the teams within SAP that are defining and implementing enterprise services. The program is new and flexible, and it will continue to evolve over time to meet the needs of the community. SAP sees that the best way to make ESA innovation flourish is to create and nurture an open community process.