Building a strong global community around data management and tools, SAP SE has seen huge success through its overall SAP online community. But SAP wanted to take that further by building smaller communities within SAP that would focus around its different offerings, such as SAP HANA, the company’s in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system. So how has the company been successful at such an endeavor, and how are they taking it even further?

“We have at SAP a global community that runs on the SAP.com platform. That’s for everybody, ” explained Scott Feldman (pictured), global head of the SAP Leonardo Customer Community at SAP. “What we realized back in around 2012 or 2013 is that we wanted to have a special place where our SAP HANA early adopter customers could go and join and network with each other on an online presence … and then have an opportunity to share their knowledge with each other and get more information from SAP.”

Feldman spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor, during the SAP Sapphire Now event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed the importance of community within SAP for the company’s HANA and Leonardo, its digital innovation system. (* Disclosure below.)

SAP initiatives target knowledge sharing

The outcome from this realization was what is called the SAP HANA International Focus Group, or iFG, Community. “What’s really interesting about the SAP HANA community is that the topic and coverage of the content is specifically related to SAP HANA — data management, database tools and technologies, analytics, and other surrounding areas that are connected to that HANA platform as an anchor,” Feldman said.

SAP has provided over 300 webinars of content of the SAP HANA iFG Community, and there are over 6,100 members globally. The company also created the SAP HANA Spotlight to highlight customer stories. Another step was doing a meeting for members, which was started in 2013, and to date there have been 24 meetings held globally.

SAP took this SAP iFG Community idea to start a new methodology called SAP Leonardo, which encourages customers to co-design, co-invent, and get engaged in the data process. “… Leonardo can be thought of as a combination of the technologies,” Feldman explained. “So we have … machine learning, [internet of things], blockchain, analytics. and a whole bunch of other things. … So … we took a lot of that and created a series of webinars and content.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the SAP Sapphire Now event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SAP Sapphire Now. Neither NetApp Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE