SAP rebrands its development platform and bundles it with S/4HANA • The Register

TechEd Global ERP slinger SAP has rebranded its developer platform and bundled it with S/4HANA, its current-generation in-memory application platform.

At German software giant TechEd’s developer conference this week in Las Vegas, Nevada, Chief Technology Officer Juergen Mueller announced a replacement for Embedded Steampunk, a tool also known as the SAP S/4HANA Cloud ABAP Environment that allows developers to to integrate the provider’s ABAP language.

SAP’s embedded steampunk is of little use to those running on anything but the latest system

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Last year, the company rolled out the platform to select customers on RISE with SAP, the provider’s lift-shift-and-transform partner plan, along with the S/4HANA Cloud 2108 edition, which became generally available in August last year.

Now SAP bundles this with S/4HANA Cloud and S/4HANA On-Premises. “We took all of the great experiences from steampunk and put them in an ABAP cloud,” Mueller said.

“ABAP Cloud is designed for state-of-the-art, stable, and cloud-ready ABAP extensions for S/4HANA directly within the S/4HANA stack. This means that public SAP APIs are used to access S/4HANA data and functionality.

“It means [using] public SAP extension points on objects, [but] Modifications to SAP objects are no longer permitted. It means [developers] you get strong tooling support in the IDE,” Mueller said.

While developers could continue to use the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model, support for Dynpro or Web Dynpro — a web programming tool introduced in 2003 — would end, he added.

“As soon as you move from ABAP Objects to ABAP Cloud, the compiler helps you follow the rules,” he says.

SAP users have been struggling with the transition to S/4HANA for years because the customizations built for many years on previous editions (ECC 6.0 is the latest) cannot be carried over to the new environment. You need to start with a “clean core”, as SAP puts it, and incorporate any changes as “extensions” into the new environment.

ABAP Cloud is “exciting because it allows customers to get to a clean core in a much easier way,” Mueller said.

But developers said there was little new in ABAP Cloud other than bundling the product with S/4HANA and renaming it.

“Last year it was already announced that they would deliver Embedded Steampunk so you can develop on S/4HANA Cloud… but no one cared. said Soren Schlegel, development architect at J&S-Soft, a Germany-based software development and consulting firm.

But bundling the product with the S/4HANA iteration will attract a new audience to the technology, who may face the same challenges when it comes to justifying the replication of changes they’ve already made in their previous version of SAP to have.

SAP is struggling to convince users of the benefits of moving to S/4HANA, as many believe they may pay huge project costs to get more or less the same functionality they already have.

“I’ve worked with companies that have invested way too much in SAP [modifications] in the last 40 years. Anything SAP is doing now with ABAP Cloud, customers will not benefit immediately as they will most likely do lift and shift. For new applications, once you are on S/4, this is a great technology as you can easily and seamlessly migrate to the latest versions. But if you start today, it could be two or five years before you see any benefit,” Schlegel said.

SAP also introduced a new Cloud Application Programming (CAP) model for Java and JavaScript developers. It includes libraries and tools for building enterprise-level services and applications.

Despite being a solid technology, it has struggled for recognition outside of the SAP world, where developers have options over what tools they use to build services that connect to core applications. Tobias Hofmann, another Germany-based software developer and consultant, compared SAP CAP to SAP Fiori, a design system that developers can use to create business apps.

“The problem is that SAP needs to get out of its comfort zone and actually struggle to gain developer community support from the SAP world, and this is where the CAP can have potential, but just look at Fiori: it’s pretty nice, but nobody does it outside of the SAP world,” he said.

Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, said SAP is moving its core offerings and development tools to the cloud but needs to convince its installed base, which has remained on-premises and has highly customized systems.

“Moving to the cloud ‘standard’ with no customization and no custom code is a tremendous challenge for businesses, and making this transition smooth and easy will be critical for SAP,” said Mueller.

“SAP will likely have to soften its stance on custom code to some point, as customers invest too much know-how and time in their many customizations. In fact, SAP has to keep existing customers’ migration effort less than the work they have to implement SAP from scratch or, what’s even harder for SAP, go to the competition and win[ting] the cloud ERP from them,” he said. ®