A crowd-sourced app for displaying developer-related metrics for SAP - let's start with #sapnwcloud

[richard_hirsch]

Recently I saw a tweet from Nikolov Radoslav (VP - SAP NetWeaver Cloud) updating the number of developers who have asked for access to NetWeaver Cloud.

He has been doing this for a while and the tweets demonstrate a new open culture at SAP as well reveal that the platform is gaining speed.

I liked the fact that this information is made publicly available but I was curious as to how to enhance this data.  Then I had an idea - instead of waiting for Rado to tweet the results what about creating an application that displays the results – then I or anyone else could look at the results whenever they wanted.

I envisioned a mobile application (either native or SAP UI5 based) with a graphic that shows the number of developers over time. Other interesting details might include be geographical location of those developers.

Then I thought about how to further exploit this opportunity. I realized that the best idea would be to crowd-source this application. SAP would create a HANA database (perhaps an AWS-based HANA XS instance) with developer-related data (not only NetWeaver Cloud but other sources as well) and provide an OData interface to this data.

Note: I've only seen publicly avaialble data regarding NW Cloud developer uptake. It would be useful to see the data on other areas (SUP, Gateway, etc) as well. If SAP provides data on the number of actual ByDesign customers or HANA Go-lives, then it should be able to provide this developer-related data as well.

This data would be interesting:

• Object: Developer license for NW Cloud, SAP UI5, SUP, downloaded trial versions of Gateway,etc
• Location: Region from which developer comes
• Timestamp: Time at which developer has signed the agreement

The limited dataset would also likely abide by privacy policies since it would be anonymized.

Based on this data, a contest would then last a month where developers could develop apps (either mobile or web-based) to display the data.  The community would then have the opportunity to vote on the best app. The source code of the winning app would then be made publicly available (for example on github) so all developers could reuse it.  Applications could be hosted of NetWeaver Cloud or somewhere else.

The winning developer team would then have bragging rights since the app would be used by many individuals (developers, influencers, analysts, etc) to quickly access this data.  Instead of just tweeting the metric, SAP and the community would be able to analyze the data in a more meaningful manner.

Initially, the data might have to added manually on a daily or weekly basis but eventually I could imagine a real-time feed that is updated as developers accept the license agreement.

Such an application would provide benefits for everyone involved – developers from inside and outside the SAP ecosystem might get involved, the scope is limited enough so that applications could be quickly created by developers of all skill levels, SAP can demonstrate how many developers are taking advantage of the ever-increasing number of technologies that are publicly available.