I thought this guy looked familiar, I met him at Foocamp a few years ago. His name is Mark Finnern and he works for SAP.
But check out those boards behind him. Yeah, SAP is using the unplanned model that Foocamp introduced. Put a grid on the wall and let people suggest their own sessions. It’s going over big time here in Las Vegas. Mark adopted the Foocamp model to SAP’s community event, meeting in Las Vegas today.
I was just there and they have 312 community members here today for SDN Day, which is SAP’s new developer network (more than 5,000 more come tomorrow for the full-blown SAP conference).
I learned from Mark Yolton, vice president of SAP’s developer network, that SAP is turning from a siloed app model into a platform model where developers can build all sorts of stuff on top of, and around, SAP.
Has this converstion been successful? They just celebrated having more than half a million developers in its developer network. In just three years. This is stunning growth for a developer network, especially for a product that doesn’t have the consumer appeal of, say, something Google or Apple builds.
This team is getting quite adept at building huge communities. Another proof point? Tomorrow SAP will announce the Business Process Expert Community. It just opened and already it has 30,000 members.
Anyway, meeting lots of SAP’ers. Anything you want to know about SAP?
One other thing, SAP has a strong blogger relations program. When I got up to the registration booth they even had a separate area for bloggers to register. They even have blogger badges.

