This week at its CRM conference in Las Vegas, SAP spoke about its newfound focus on customer co-innovation. Bob Stutz, senior vice president and general manager of CRM global strategy at the German giant was quoted in this article as saying:

“We realized we didn’t need 100 Ph.D.’s to make one single piece of functionality. This product is not ‘by SAP,’ but ‘by SAP with customers.’ Without customers, this new offering would not be possible.”

That’s great Bob, welcome to the 21^st century.

I like SAP…I really do. They’ve done a great job of embracing SOA, have built their products through internal R&D as opposed to acquisition, and they’ve been a quiet counterbalance to the loud and flamboyant Oracle. I also give Stutz credit for his candid remarks and recognition of the problem. But it’s quotes like this that speak to the reasons that undermine a proprietary development model, because SAP is also known for its large and unwieldy deployments, troublesome integration, and cumbersome UI. While I’m glad Stutz is calling for “customer co-innovation” at SAP these days, it’s 2008. A “user friendly” UI, personalized background colors and layouts, and rearranged dashboards? SugarCRM, along with plenty of other vendors, have had that for years.

As Martin eluded to in his blog from yesterday, our 60,000+ community members, both Community Edition users and commercial customers alike, freely participate in the development and testing of Sugar because it results in a more efficient and user-driven piece of software…a communal approach that takes the very best of what everybody brings to the table.

For SAP CRM 2007, Stutz says the company surveyed 180 customers, or approximately 4 percent of its roughly 41,000+ customer companies. For Sugar 5.0, we surveyed 30,000 people. You do the math.