The idea is that we want to become more collaborative. We are putting more information out on the open web - on YouTube, for example, with a lot of our webcasts - and also on the content that we see on SCN. It really is opening it up, not only for the existing customer base, but also in the prospective customers that are looking at what kind of offering we have on the support side and services. This is all a very nice way of getting a lot of discussion going across all these parties.

Reed: Michael, what are you noticing about this interaction between customers and SAP on ALM?

Schwandt: What we recognize is that many of the solution managers are on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. They go into the discussion forums and figure out what the sentiment is in the customer area: what the feedback is, what's in, what's out, where are bucks. Especially in some area,s like BSP, all the solution managers used these comments and brought them back into the architecture and decided, on this customer's feedback, to move these new features into the latest release and versions.

Reed: One thing I've noticed about your ALM team is that you've been really active in terms of blogging, giving webcasts, having a public face for the information you're sharing. Does the time invested in these kinds of activities pay off? A lot of us are struggling to figure out how we balance our internal project work with getting the word out about what we do. What kind of balance are you striking around that issue?

Stoddard: We're not just putting a lot of information out there for how to get started with the whole ALM processes and capabilities. We're also trying to empower the customers or the users that are looking at this material in order to make business cases. If you think about it, we're putting out a lot of information about what other customers are doing, we're having a lot of, for example, success stories and quotes, and also we're also going to be publishing jointly with IDC.

IDC is putting out a white paper about the ROI that Solution Manager can provide. We really want to have this information out there so that if, for example, an IT management customer wants to go and make a business case for adopting a specific Solution Manager capability, then they're empowered to have all of this other information. Really, what we're doing is making sort of an ERP system for IT: we're making a product that the IT organizations can use to optimize and to get better innovation and better quality.

We want to be able to provide enough information so they can determine that they may have to make an initial investment in implementing this capability and these processes, but this is a return on investment that they can realize and they can see this approach seems to be very successful going forward now that we're putting all this information out in a common location.

Reed: An ERP system for IT, that's a whole new development.

Stoddard: Well, it's really not a system, it's a product. We're treating IT like a real line of business; they are key to the customer's success, they want to make sure that the business processes, or the solutions, are operating in the most optimal way. We also want to do more or less reactionary monitoring and do more automation across the board so the IT organization can be more innovators and bring in new functionality to make their business run better instead of just being in reactive mode all the time.

This way, it's like IT isn't just a group that's a necessary evil for the customer, it's really a key generator of new applications to actually optimize the business. If we empower them with all this information and all these different forums, it just makes it a better value for the customers and lower total cost of ownership.

Reed: Michael, what do you think of that? That's a pretty big change in how we think of IT in an ERP landscape.

Schwandt: We support it majorly because currently the focus has been more on supporting these technical areas, how to implement that stuff. We addressed this with the people who already made the decision. Now, moving forward, we are more focused on justifications, helping people to make the best decision, to build their plan before they make the final decision.

Reed: You've added some useful resources to the SAP community around ALM, but there is much more to come because you have big plans for spring rollouts of functionality. Can you tell our listeners what they can expect in the new year?

Schwandt: What we are currently planning is to offer dashboards for the community where you can build your business cases. You can use them to build your business case, you can get back to us and modify these dashboards, upload it again and share it with the community. These are the new things we're doing. These are based on Xcelsius and Explorer, so you can download the stuff, build your own cases with all the variables, which is all the boundary conditions, then really get the feedback of the other guys in the community.

Reed: Have you decided on a timeframe for that?

Schwandt: This will all happen before we go live in the left side navigation, and this is planned for February 1st next year. You can expect this in the second half of January.

Reed: Evan, you had a comment on that?

Stoddard: The big thing from the Solution Manager side in 2010 is a new version of the Solution Manager platform, which will ramp up probably the middle of the year. That is our new version that will have the latest, greatest CRM 7.0 system at the heart of it, so this will mean we'll have the very powerful message processing application that can be used for a lot of the other functions of Solution Manager: test messaging, change request management, incident management.

It will also have the latest NetWeaver infrastructure for monitoring and alerting, and new functions like end user experience monitoring. We're very excited this version will be out as well as this big push across the board for the ALM offering, so these two will go hand-in-hand for those customers that really want the leverage, the best of the functionality that we can provide in this year.

Reed: Before we wrap this up, I'm going to give each of you one more question. You can either address a misconception about ALM that you'd like to clear up, or you pick a point that you would like to emphasize with our listeners today.

Stoddard: A misconception we're seeing, which has been going on for some time, is that we are really only looking at the SAP landscape and not really able to support any third party applications that are part of the end-to-end support application. A lot of customers think, Well, we have a solution that's got some third party components running the business, but we can only use SAP's offerings and tools and capabilities, which is the SAP component.

But what we've been doing the last couple of years is opening up the whole concept to work with the entire end-to-end solution regardless if it's an SAP product or not. For example, you can include third party components in the projects, in the testing area and in the monitoring area. If for example, we don't have coverage in a specific area, we are able to offer some kind of integration with third party tools to make that work. But really we're responsible as part of enterprise support with the entire customer end-to-end solution, all the application. This is part of the holistic approach that we cover as much as possible, but it is tied to the customer's business processes and solutions.

Reed: And Michael?

Schwandt: I would like to invite the members to use the time before February 1st to write about their project, about their duties, and about their requirements, using the new blog category called Application Lifecycle Management and get it started as soon as possible. Reach out to us, reach out to the other guys, share your problems with it and wait for the feedback. We have a committed team, we have a committed community, and you will get something back.

Reed: For our listeners: when you're posting a blog entry, you can select a category, so make sure you select ALM when you're posting in this area and that will put you in touch with other people who are tracking that.

Thank you both for joining us today and giving us an inside look at where ALM is headed and why SCN is becoming a focal point for these discussions.

Before we sign off, I'd like to make sure our listeners know how to access the Application Lifecycle Management area on SCN. If you are not yet registered with SAP's online communities, you can register with the Developer Network and the Business Objects Community, the BPX Community, all at the same time and, once you're registered, you will have access to all of those resources as well as commenting on the topics that we have discussed.

On that note, I would like to thank our listeners for joining us today for this SAP podcast. This is Jon Reed signing off. We'll see you soon at SAP.com.