I lead Developer Experience at SAP.The mission of our team is to drive adoption of SAP technology platforms, and especially HANA, by reaching out to developers.Why reach out to developers outside of SAP? Of course many of us at SAP have a developer background and we love hanging out with developers, but how does it make business sense? In 4 different ways.HELP SELL. We are all in sales. If more developers know about our technologies, try them out and like them, then SAP is more likely to sell. Developers do not buy SAP technology directly but they are strong influencers in the sales cycle. Good CIOs listen to their technical experts.GROW THE ECOSYSTEM: If we want to grow our ecosystem in mobile, cloud and mobile, we need people to write applications on top of our platforms. Who are those people? Developers and entrepreneurs. If we can show that our platforms enable developers to quickly develop robust applications and sell them efficiently, we’ve won. Let’s not kid ourselves, we are only at the very early stages of building a robust ecosystem, and many questions are still unanswered.ITERATE QUICKLY: Increase opportunities for SAP developers of platforms to learn directly from external developers. Direct developer-to-developer communication, no bullshit.ATTRACT TALENT: If you were a very talented developer in KA, DA or Berlin, would you think of SAP as a place where you could work on cutting-edge software? Probably not. Boring ABAP business apps, code for moving data from database to ugly screen and back.According to analyst firm Redmonk, “developers are the new king makers”. This statement may not apply to everything SAP does and sell, but we believe it definitely applies to the part of our business where the end users are developers, our platform business.
The definition of a developer in NA’s RTDP plan is actually very broad:“A fundamental requirement for the success of any Innovation Platform is its broad embrace and adoption by a massive community of technical specialists who implement, administrate, and develop applications upon it. By doing so, these “developers” (Note: The term “developer” has been used to broadly encompass all technical specialists who implement, administrate, or develop solutions on top of a platform. This includes DBAs, application developers, consultants, etc. that work for customers, partners, start-ups, or as independent contractors) tie their livelihood to the platform and cement the platform into the IT landscape of organizations everywhere.”We need to make sure that we all speak of the same thing.