No Code

At the top is Abap on the BTP with the code name Steampunk. But there are also numerous low-code/no-code offerings. Java is also still in demand and the "Bring Your Own Programming Languages" concept also exists.

There is a saying that many cooks spoil the broth. In the end, the existing SAP customer could be left without any code at all, or the saying goes: Many roads lead to Rome. At the SAP Competence Center Summit 2023 in Salzburg, the E-3 editorial team surveyed the preferences of existing customers and partners. Abap is still at the top of the list. Not many Summit participants give SAP's low-code/no-code offering Build a chance. Nevertheless, there are good low-code approaches in the SAP community, see the following report by Simplifier in this cover story.

To avoid a no-code disaster, existing SAP customers face a double challenge: How to bring Abap modifications from the Z namespace to S/4 and how to realize future customization on the SAP Business Technology Platform? Abap RESTful Application Programming (RAP), Cloud Application Programming (CAP), Low Code/No Code with SAP Build, and Steampunk as Embedded Abap are just a small selection of the ways in which an SAP inventory customer can modify their ERP system in the future. Accordingly, it is not only necessary to study various concepts from open source and GitHub to proprietary steampunk code, but also to learn the programming languages themselves. No easy task for programmers in which language to code the algorithms in the future - and there's Java, too!

The response to Steampunk was very positive in the DSAG working groups at the Technology Days in Mannheim. For the most part, however, these were existing SAP customers who had spent half their professional lives with Abap. What does the future hold? Should a new customer for the private or public cloud also learn Abap with a view to steampunk? Karl Kessler, VP Product Management Abap Platform at SAP, answers this question in an E-3 exclusive interview: "Abap is still relevant and will remain so in the future. For S/4 customers, both existing and new, SAP offers a modern Abap Cloud development model. Abap Cloud allows to build upgradeable and cloud-enabled solutions and extensions. Depending on the scenario, customers or partners can build their Abap Cloud extension directly on the S/4 stack or on the Business Technology Platform. Within the community, this is also referred to as Embedded Steampunk or Steampunk. The Abap Cloud development model is available on the BTP and in all S/4 editions, i.e. public cloud, private cloud and on-prem, in the latest version."

Abap modifications

Many successful R/3 systems are also based on extensive Abap modifications. The question of total cost of ownership (TCO) in Abap coding rarely arose. With the advent of NetWeaver and new possibilities for system customization, even in the Z namespace, considerations regarding programming costs are becoming increasingly relevant. At the latest when switching to S/4 Hana, every existing SAP customer should keep a very close eye on the "TCO of Coding".

With the rise of the so-called composable enterprise, demand is also increasing for reusable software components with which solutions can be developed quickly and efficiently. The digital association Bitkom postulates: Digitized companies are pulling ahead of the competition! There is growing concern among German companies that they are losing out to their digital competitors. A clear majority of companies currently foresee competitors that have focused on digitization at an early stage. This is a peak value. A year ago, only 52 percent of companies saw their digital competitors pulling away; five years ago, the figure was as low as 37 percent. Two-thirds currently consider their own company to be a latecomer to digitization, while one-third see themselves as pioneers. These are the findings of a representative survey of 602 companies with 20 or more employees in Germany commissioned by the digital association Bitkom.

Importance of digitization

"Companies have recognized the importance of digitization for their own future. However, they apparently do not know how to approach digitization. For each individual company, as well as for the German economy as a whole, the motto must be: make the 2020s the digital decade!" demands the new Bitkom President Ralf Wintergerst on the occasion of the presentation of the study. "In the past, Germany was the land of poets and thinkers. In the future, Germany must be the land of poets, thinkers and digitalizers."

AI is not the only technology for which there is a discrepancy between its perceived importance for overall competitiveness and its use in the company itself. For example, 92 percent of companies consider data analysis and big data to be very important, but only 39 percent use them. Robotics is considered significant by 86 percent, but only 40 percent use the technology. The picture is similar for the Internet of Things (84 percent major importance, 36 percent use), 5G (82 percent to 23 percent), autonomous vehicles (76 percent to 17 percent), 3D printing (74 percent to 23 percent) and virtual and augmented reality (67 percent to 24 percent).

And use of newer technologies is even rarer: just 4 percent use blockchain technology, although 67 percent attribute great importance to it. And virtually no companies use metaverse technologies themselves (1 percent), although 36 percent still attribute great importance to them. "We need to position Germany outstandingly well in the digital economy. We need more courage to go digital, also in companies," says Wintergerst.

The biggest obstacle to digitization from a company's perspective is data protection, which 77 percent feel is hindering their digital transformation. A year ago, the figure was 71 percent. The shortage of skilled workers (64 percent; 2022: 55 percent) is also becoming more acute. These are followed by requirements for technical IT security, lack of time and lack of financial resources - with scarce resources being cited significantly more frequently as a reason than in 2022 with 43 percent each. By contrast, a lack of willingness on the part of the workforce (12 percent) and uncertainty about the economic benefits of digitization (5 percent) are not widespread obstacles.

Composability

For existing SAP customers, a key step toward digitization will be the individualization, adaptation and composability of their own ERP system, ECC or S/4. Modifications have always represented added value for SAP users, which has repeatedly moved the ERP world market leader to new programming models, even beyond Abap. In 2020, SAP presented its first low-code trial with the Ruum framework, which is designed to enable users without programming skills to create departmental processes within hours instead of days or weeks.

A short time later, in 2021, SAP announced the acquisition of AppGyver. AppGyver is a start-up in the field of no-code development platforms that enable users without programming skills to create mobile applications as well as applications for the web. And again, SAP said, "The acquisition of AppGyver will enable SAP to better support its existing customers and partners in efficiently adapting IT systems to their own specific needs and optimizing the user experience of their applications. AppGyver's solutions will become part of the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). AppGyver is designed to expand SAP's business process intelligence offering and complement SAP's low-code offering, which is provided by partner Mendix and is part of Siemens. Mendix's low-code framework was even on SAP's price list at one time, and there were joint SAP-Mendix congress trade shows. In the meantime, this partnership has broken up, but Ruum and AppGyver have also disappeared into oblivion, so the community is talking about "no code" in this regard.

Anyone can develop apps, SAP declared, promoting a unified low-code/no-code experience based on the Business Technology Platform. Both professional and specialist developers are able to develop new applications with it. Existing apps can be improved and complex tasks automated with it, SAP said. AppGyver offers no-code development and automation, while SAP Business Application Studio increases low-code development. The argument heard over and over again is that with low code, the technical complexity is much less than with traditional programming methods.

Application Development

A recent study by Techconsult in collaboration with Neptune Software shows that low-code platforms have already become a relevant option within SAP application development at German companies. According to the survey, more than two-thirds of all companies (68 percent) are already actively working on corresponding solutions. Flexible and modern software solutions, such as SAP's Intelligent Enterprise solution framework, which also includes the new ERP world around S/4, are a key success factor for further digitization and the foundation for digital processes.

These challenges are increasingly being met with agile, innovative development methods and technologies have now evolved that make software more flexible and cost-effective. There is a move away from large, time-consuming and cost-intensive software rollouts toward agile development with fully automated processes and development methods, which are necessary for the fast-moving environment of digitization in order to be able to develop and provide software with the required quality, speed and efficiency even in times of tight budgets and resources. In the SAP environment, low-code platforms offer different approaches to support the development of individual SAP applications or the further development and adaptation of existing applications.

UI5 and Fiori

For example, they offer the ability to develop UI5-based Fiori apps in the existing SAP infrastructure during the S/4 transition and continue to do so thereafter. Using graphical modeling tools, developers do not need HTML5 or JavaScript skills, and Abap developers can use SAP's strategic technology stack in the core digital system to develop custom apps without additional tools or expertise, as well as provide business functions as APIs.

Although the benefits are clear, the final framework is unlikely to have been found yet at SAP itself, because Ruum and AppGyver were followed last fall by Build, which is another low-code offering for the Business Technology Platform. The new IT tool is designed to enable users to create and extend enterprise applications, automate processes, and easily drag-and-drop web interfaces into a prototype with minimal technical knowledge. "SAP Build brings together the world's most powerful enterprise applications on a platform specifically designed to enable business users in the shortest possible time," said Jürgen Müller, member of the Executive Board and chief technology officer at SAP.

It should be possible to map the complete lifecycle of an application in just one low-code platform.

"The demand for advanced digital solutions is significantly greater than the capacity of professional developers to deliver them," said Arnal Dayaratna, research vice president of software development at IDC. "IDC expects more than 100 million enterprise users worldwide to be involved in the development of digital solutions over the next decade. With SAP Build's low-code development solutions, business users can leverage their expertise to rapidly develop and optimize digital solutions at scale."

But there are also two weighty reasons that speak against SAP Build, the latest no-code/low-code offering from Walldorf: GRC and MS Power Apps. If every SAP user now becomes an app developer with Build, then the governance-risk-compliance chaos will not stay away for long. And with Microsoft Power, there is the much larger community that is largely compatible with Hana and S/4. Why doesn't SAP cooperate with Microsoft and bring Power to the BTP?

Microsoft Power

Two years ago, Microsoft employee Holger Bruchelt wrote in E-3 Magazine: "Low Code/No Code has been the talk of the SAP community, and not just since SAP's various acquisitions. Low Code/No Code enables new groups of people to develop necessary applications not only faster, but also more cost-effectively. A few years ago, Gartner had already reported on the enormous bottleneck of application developers, and many companies had noticed in their own companies that the necessary developers were missing or that the waiting time for the development of a new application was long.

It is no longer possible to keep up. So, out of necessity, error-prone workarounds are built and the data is then transferred to the SAP system "by hand". The available resources then usually bypass security, quality management and the actual processes. In some cases, this entails major risks, including the loss of data. This is probably one of the reasons why many companies have established a "business-critical Excel", with which companies (have to) work in parallel to their SAP environment. OData now makes it relatively easy to keep data synchronized with the "single source of truth" SAP system and to map more complex processes with numerous Excel macros - but that was never really the purpose of these programs.

With SAP Ruum, SAP Intelligent RPA, SAP Conversational AI or the new AppGyver, SAP existing customers have now been given various tools that are intended to empower them to develop new user interfaces and automate process flows themselves. The SAP Store for iRPA, for example, offers an excellent starting point here and shows how SAP processes can now be automated more easily.

A classic SAP system consists of three hierarchy levels: Development, test and productive system - and that's a good thing! First, development takes place, in the past with Abap and Java, in the future obviously with Build on BTP, the Business Technology Platform; then the transport into the test system takes place and a reality check is made with anonymized test data; if everything goes well, then the transport and the activation in the productive system take place. This decades-old roadmap has proven its worth. In the dawning build age, nothing is heard of it.

Obviously, two questions arise: How can Build on the BTP guarantee data consistency in the Hana database if everyone is allowed to modify and manipulate here? How to ensure that the neighbor does not implement the same idea just with a different UI? Build would have to have a very smart repository to alert in advance the creative users of redundancy and lack of consistency.

Overall, it can be said that SAP Build cannot deliver on the promise of a low-code development platform. There are various limitations and shortcomings for both business users and pro-code developers. The platform is not yet mature enough and does not offer a comprehensive and, above all, uniform solution approach for the development of enterprise applications. Originally, SAP Build was touted as a solution that would allow companies to create their own applications and processes without programming skills. In practice, however, it is apparent that this platform requires considerable programming skills.

Skepticism and added value

Based on past developments and skepticism towards low-code/no-code platforms, it is a challenge to convince the community that the proprietary low-code solution can provide real added value. Many members of the SAP community have strong ties to Abap and may view low-code/no-code development as a departure from established practices and standards. However, the reservations within the SAP community can be overcome. This is because the low-code approach offers many added values, which are very often confirmed by companies that use low-code alternatives outside BTP. However, low code should not be just a technology. Low code is a mindset that must become part of the DNA of companies.