Thomas Otter has an excellent post about innovation going on inside the SAP customer base. For once, it is answering the critique many levy: Stop telling us about your products, show how you’re helping SAP customers innovate.

I was fascinated by the work done by a couple of Colgate-Palmolive engineers. All done in their spare time. This is a demo about using a Wiimote in an SAP BusinessWarehouse project environment by two or more people as compared with using a mouse in a sequential manner. It may sound trite and the engineers are not really sure if there’s a commercial use. But by hooking the concept of consumery fun to a serious business application, they have shown the potential to change perceptions about how easy or hard it is to use enterprise software.

The big question must be: What has SAP contributed to enable this happy state of affairs? There is no doubt that having an open environment helps immensely. The application uses Ruby on Rails, a relatively new programming language much favoured by those who like AJAXy applications and a very fast development platform. Good examples can be found at the 37 Signals site and include collaborative project services, an information organizer and calendar and group chat. To give an indication of popularity, Basecamp, the project service has more than 1 million people signed up.

But there is more at play here. Thomas says SAP needs to get better at ferreting out customer use cases. For the first time on a vendor employed blog I heard the magic words for which I’ve been waiting over 10 years:

We need to do a better job at uncovering and nurturing it, but SDN is a great place to start. Customers telling their own story, in their own words beats a brochure anyday.

Now that particular genie is out the bottle, sack most of the PR department and whomever the geniuses are that waste a ton of money on dead tree case study books, the last of which I used to prop the bathroom door open. With the money saved, put 70% back into R&D innovation, and 30% into finding customer heroes who will talk to the innovation folk - perhaps through SDN. Heck - I’d do that gig. With pleasure.

But there is another thing going on. Check out Daniel McWeeney’s post on SAP users of tomorrow:

If you have a child who is less then 30 years old and you work in an IT shop that runs SAP software, you should be scared…if someone gives me a piece of software I “must use” and it is horrible, the first thing I do before using it is to see if there is another tool I can quickly use the way I want and then just plug the numbers into the horrible tool. This is a huge problem for SAP as that all the wonder process focus.

Does this sound familiar? It is precisely the issue I believe will floor many software vendors. It’s a big part of why Freshbooks is doing such a brilliant job and why Sage still sucks.

Does this mean SAP rocks? No. Individuals doing great things are what rock. Now if SAP could find 100 folk with stories like C-P, I might think about changing my tune. If they appointed a board member tasked and budgeted for innovation and put a number on it, I’d almost be ‘on side.’

If that’s a challenge Thomas is up for, then let’s talk to Steve Mann (who is a fan of this type of medium.) Work with your critics. then maybe we can all move on to constructive things.

Edward Herrmann’s post to SDN (Edward is one of the C-P folk) is here and attracting interesting comments. Note to Edward - put the movie on YouTube - it’s the industry standard -:)

If you are sick enough to want a go at turning your Wiiremote onto a bluetooth mouse, then check this detailed post. It’s surprisingly easy.