I was just talking to Shai Agassi at SAP and he gave me a pretty interesting factoid: The SAP Developer Network (SDN) Web site attracts about 500,000 anonymous visitors per month. And the site has become a wellspring of information, feedback and ideas for SAP’s development plans. After two years in operation, SAP is contributing less than 20% of the content on the site; the rest is coming from the community in the form of pasted articles, threaded discussions and even some minor script sharing.

Also, the community has become a reliable method of recieving fast, free support for SAP users in a pinch. Agassi estimated that the average time it takes to get an answer to a question on the site is about 30 minutes. Calling an official SAP help desk operator is most likely not that efficient a process.

Agassi says the community helped shape a lot of the thinking behind its mammoth move towards SOA. But it makes you wonder just how much the SDN community could be used to actually create a more solid feedback and development/QA loop that goes beyond simple surveys and into actualy code contributions for extensions, patches, etc.

SAP is extending the concept in a more formailzed way with its new industry value network (IVN), which is a verticalized and more complex approach to the SDN that brings together major customers and ISV partners to optimize vertical customizations. But this will not have the critical mass and interactive appeal that SDN posesses. There are a lot of possibilities here, and it will be interesting to see how SAP utilizes this vast resource going forward.