It’s a late afternoon in Boston at the Park Plaza Hotel and SAP’s Dr. Raj Nathan is surrounded by a group of bloggers and analysts.

It’s the annual SAP Influencer Summit and the day as you can expect is full of questions about SAP’s strategy for the cloud, its back office software and how the company will remain relevant in a time when social apps, tablets and all the other symbols of a new, modern architecture are turning developers into the new tech rockstars.

John Appleby, a consultant with Bluefin Solutions out of the United Kingdom, delivers his pitch. Nathan is listening. Appleby explains it like this:

A mobile app on the Apple iOS platform may take a month to develop. It can then take another month to get the app approved. An Android app can take less than a month to develop and launch.

The developers who want to build a mobile app for SAP’s mobile app store? That may take as long as nine months.

Nathan gets it. He tells us that SAP needs to build communities for the self-reliant developer. He talks about how it also has to build communities where clusters of small developer shops can learn from each other about building for the SAP platform.

This new developer movement is not easy for SAP. SAP executives talk about ecosystems. But the billions in revenue come from its traditional, on-premise software. Powerful, heavyweight stuff that can cost millions to implement. In contrast are the lightweight apps that developers now build for the iOS, Android and even now some enterprise platforms.

You can sense a conflict in SAP’s approach. I understand the pressures to be both lightweight and respectful of long-term customers who can not just rip and replace. The heavyweight systems cost millions to integrate. That is SAP’s strategy. But it creates inherent issues. In particular, it can lead to lost opportunities.

SAP is not alone in this paradox. Analyst Ray Wang says all the major technology vendors are building platforms for developers to test apps. IBM has it. Oracle is getting close. Microsoft needs to fix SQL Server Azure before they fully have it. VMware is working on it with CloudFoundry.

The big threat? Salesforce.com. The company’s Force.com platform has already been built and developers are already selling apps.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff pointed to the paradox in a story this morning by the New York Times Quentin Hardy:

With its emphasis on collaboration and quick completion of tasks, “the social enterprise model will blur what is sales, what is service and what is finance,” Mr. Benioff said in a recent interview. “This isn’t about supply chains,” he said, “this is about the most important relationship a company has, the customer.”

The idea is to build lightweight front ends that can talk to the back-end. That’s a tricky combination for SAP. That means integrations with outside developer communities. Historically that has been big systems integrators who can afford the licensing. What we don’t hear about is RESTful APIs with SAP back-end systems.

But in the meantime, SAP can make some fixes that will go along way in helping developers.

Remove the Friction Points

The simplest thing SAP can do is remove the friction points. I heard this over and over from the mentors and influencers at the summit. How do you do this? Jon Reed’s statements to me in an interview echo what others like Appleby and Dennis Howlett say:

• Think in terms of how do you go from idea to selling.
• Provide more free access to tools. Licensing fees on tools may run upwards of $20,000. That’s too much for the small developer.
• Open the sandbox. Currently a developer can’t finish with an app.
• Keep hacking. Continue with the sandbox program, InnoJams and the Train Race program to learn Gateway, the SAP developer environment. All of these go a long way to building a developer community.

Champagne pricing is a big part of the problem, Howlett says. And that to me points to SAP’s conflicted efforts with developers.The on-premise culture does affect SAP’s thinking. But that may be besides the point if SAP can break out with a fast-cycle development process for mobile apps.

Embrace the Hard Core Geek

The SAP enterprise geeks are passionate about their work. It’s these tight communities that SAP needs to embrace. This core community can help SAP extend deeper into the mainstream developer community that now place attention for the most part on Apple, Google, Facebook and the extensive ecosystem of individuals who build Web and mobile apps.

The Little Guys Need More Attention

The large systems integrators get the most attention. People working from their homes or small consulting shops are not of primary importance.

The influencers? They say to attract the young, Web-centric developer means working with small and large partners and believing in the ecosystem. But listen to what IBM’s Viijay Vijayasankar has to say as well.

I agree with Vijayasankaram that 2013 will be the year of the SAP ecosystem. SAP has SuccessFactors to absorb, licensing questions to resolve, pricing, etc. Once those are resolved then look for momentum in the second half of the year with things really taking ship by early 2013.

But I have faith in Nathan and other executives such as Kevin Nix who is responsible for the company’s enterprise applications in the cloud. These people get it.

Welcome to the age of the developer.