A hot topic among social media bloggers these days is exactly which big companies “get” the value of connectedness, community and emergent technologies and which don’t.  A subsidiary discussion to that is around which traditionally managed corporations are jumping on the bandwagon for PR reasons because they want to be seen as one of the cool kids and which ones are actually making fundamental changes to way they interact with their customers, partners and employees.  

Having spent a lot of time talking with a number of SAP executives at SAPPHIRE in Atlanta earlier this week, I’m delighted to report that SAP is one of those forward-looking giants that get it.  Big time.   I’m not talking just about the fact that the company invited more than 20 of us lowly bloggers to sit in the big room with the regular press and analyst corps or that Mike Procenco and Stacy Fish put together a dynamite program of sessions with executives on topics that were of particular interest to us. 

Or even that they provided access to any executives or customers we wanted to talk to and let us talk to them without hovering protectively in the background.  All of those things were welcome and displayed a level of transparency and candor that just didn’t exist in any big corporation I know of five years ago.  

The new SAP attitude is clearly rooted in the company’s discovery that communities and co-innovation are a superior approach to the ”assign an army of software developers to a task and see what they come up with” style of development.  Opening up the process to partners and customers (and, indeed, anyone who wants to participate) provides the kind of give-and-take that leads to better products, satisfied buyers, reduced costs and happier employees.  

The granddaddy of these communities–the SAP Developer Network (SDN)–has grown from 340,000 members in 2005 to more than 750,000 today. (SDN has its own “evangelist,” Craig Cmehil.)  The Business Process community (BPX) was launched in the third quarter of 2006 and already has more than 100,000 members.  Both have proven to be invaluble resources and converted even the most skeptical oldtimers to the belief that there may be something to this Enterprise 2.0 business afterall. 

Another hub of 2.0 activity at SAP is the Emerging Solutions unit, led by general manager Dennis Moore, which is working on things like creating widgets that make it much easier for authorized users to get to the data they need inside SAP systems and a joint project called Duet with Microsoft that will allow SAP users to seamlessly use Office tools to work with processes and data.  The unit even has its own vp of “imagineering,” a bright young man named Denis Browne.

Emerging Solutions was also involved in building a kind of internal MySpace/LinkedIn social directory called Harmony where employees with similar interests and skills can find each other.  I was sitting way down at the end of the table when Dennis Moore was explaining Harmony but I somehow got the impression that Harmony is, at least in part, an attempt to provide SAP’s best employees with an alternative to posting their resumes on LinkedIn or MySpace where they can easily be poached by other firms.

What most convinced me that SAP gets it, though, is the enthusiasm of the people I spoke to.  You couldn’t help getting the feeling that SAP has become a fun place to work.  Not the kind of thing you would expect from a aging–how should I put this…German…engineering-oriented–software company with a reputation, not entirely undeserved, for making complex and costly products mainly for big companies.  The new SAP is rapidly becoming a classic case study in how Enterprise 2.0 technologies, combined with a collaborative, social mindset, can give a giant corporation a second wind.