SAP Community - SAP TechEd

SAP Developer News: TechEd Day 2

2024-10-09T16:10:00.035000+02:00

DESCRIPTION

SAP TechEd General

News Guide: https://www.sap.com/events/teched/news-guide.html
TechEd Watch Live: https://www.sap.com/events/teched.html

Data and Analytics

Data and Analytics News: https://www.sap.com/events/teched/news-guide/data-and-analytics.html
SAP HANA Cloud Sessions: https://www.sap.com/events/teched/virtual/flow/sap/te24/catalog/page/catalog?tab.day=20241009&search.offeringsproducts=1693018299239028TpZb

Integration

Integration News: https://www.sap.com/events/teched/news-guide/integration.html
Integration Sessions: https://www.sap.com/events/teched/virtual/flow/sap/te24/catalog/page/catalog?tab.day=20241009&search.track=1692371026432005VcKa

New SAP Build Capabilities

SAP Build Extensibility Wizard: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/sap-build-extensibility-wizard-for-sap-s-4hana-cloud-public-edition/ba-p/13867427
AD105 | Enhance your fusion team collaboration with ABAP Cloud and SAP Build https://www.sap.com/events/teched/virtual/flow/sap/te24/catalog/page/catalog/session/1721791179884001rYRe
AD200 | Extend Joule with SAP Build and develop custom enterprise skills https://www.sap.com/events/teched/virtual/flow/sap/te24/catalog/page/catalog/session/1722394882377001d2M9

CHAPTER TITLES

0:00 Intro
0:10 TechEd Intro
1:13 Data and Analytics
2:25 Integration
3:49 New SAP Build Capabilities

Transcript

[Intro] It's a long way from Philly to Heidelberg, but the show must go on. We're late, aren't we? Yeah, we're late. We all know there's nothing like the real thing. Luckily, we've got our best people on the job. Oh, sorry, Josh! Josh, if you pulled your own weight, we wouldn't have to carry you through this place.

[Witalij] There were many extremely interesting announcements related to data and analytics during SAP TechEd Virtual. Some of them are coming in Q1 of 2025, while others are already available. For example, you might have noticed that as technology continues to evolve, we've also brought SAP Analytics Cloud to Apple Vision Pro. We also announced new data lake capabilities for SAP DataSphere. These new capabilities, including Object Store, Spark processing, and SQL on files, will be available starting in Q4 2024. Looking like I'll need to develop new CodeJam exercises and hit the road with them in 2025. I've done a lot of CodeJam focused on getting started with HANA ML capabilities, and I'm already excited that the development of intelligent data apps will become even more efficient with the introduction of the generative AI toolkit for SAP HANA Cloud. I hope you've seen this in the announcements.

Additionally, the new introduced Knowledge Graph engine in SAP HANA Cloud, combined with the accelerated vector engine, will be a powerful combo for building even more impactful AI-based applications using SAP data. So lots of work and fun ahead. Stay with us.

[Antonio] Hola, SAP developers. Many announcements in the integration space as part of SAP TechEd 2024. So we have new integration adapters to easily connect to ANAPLAN, CUPA, HubSpot, NetSuite ERP, Snowflake, and more. We also have a new message status overview monitor. That's the aggregated overview of the status messages, for example, that we had in SAP Process Orchestration that we all love. The migration tool has been enhanced. Now it's possible to do mass migration of integration scenarios. There's a new licensing option for SAP Integration Suite, which is called Starter Edition. This is focused for grow with SAP customers and SAP SuccessFactors customers. Also, we have new generative AI capabilities in SAP Integration Suite. So we can now optimize our groovy scripts in SAP Cloud Integration. And finally, the product, SAP Event Broker for SAP Cloud Applications, was recently renamed to SAP Cloud Application Event Hub. Apart from that, you can check out the documentation in CAP to see how you can easily connect your CAP application deployed to SAP BTP to the SAP Application Event Hub.

[Shrini] SAP announces several improvements to SAP Build. Its comprehensive solution for extending S/4 HANA Cloud and other line of business applications. The most significant updates enhance SAP Build by streamlining S/4 HANA extension developments, introducing new generative AI capabilities, and expanding access to about development tools. A new extension wizard available now lets developers access SAP Build directly from S/4 HANA Cloud Public Edition. With this access, developers can extend custom fields, business logic, and processes, either on-stack or side-by-side. A critical feature of this integration is the knowledge of business context, such as events and objects, when creating business processes and while transitioning between S/4 HANA and SAP brand. This preserves important business information, enabling developers to switch between environments seamlessly without losing crucial context.

In Q4 2024, the extension wizard will let developers create SAP Fiori and SAPUI5 applications, leveraging the full set of features available in SAP Build. In Q4 2024, new capabilities such as code exploration and documentation search in SAP Build Code will reduce development time for Java and JavaScript developers. Low-code developers and business users will also be able to create user interfaces and automate workflows with assistance from Juul. Joule is SAP's generative AI assistant. In Q1 2025, ABAP developers will be able to generate high-quality code and unit tests with Joule that comply with ABAP cloud development model. Joule will also be able to generate explanations for legacy code, making it easier to modernize legacy code bases and migrate to a clean code. By end of Q4 2024, Joule will also be integrated into SAP Build Work Zone, a low-code tool for creating engaging and personalized business sites. Joule's generative AI capabilities will offer user task automation and intelligent support.

[Sheena] By end of 2024, developers will also be able to use low-code capabilities in SAP build to enhance Joule with new skills, integrating it seamlessly with both SAP and non-SAP applications. This flexibility ensures Joule can be tailored to meet customer-specific business needs. Finally, developers can create applications that feature alternative AI capabilities by taking full advantage of HANA Cloud to ground large language models using its vector engine. Soon, developers will also be able to achieve this S/4 HANA Cloud Knowledge Graph Engine, scheduled for general availability in the first half of 2025. By the end of 2024, SAP Build will include access to ABAP development tools and ABAP development environments for SAP S/4 HANA Cloud and SAP BTP. New access from the SAP Build Lobby, the solution's central starting point for all extension projects, will make it easier for multi-disciplinary development teams, also known as Fusion Teams, to build extensions and custom processes across all technology stacks. Developers will also be able to create and monitor their web cloud projects directly from SAP Build. This integration streamlines workflows by reducing the need to switch between different environments, significantly improving development efficiency.

SAP Teched ---- I was worried this year... On-Premise - Favorite Session

2024-10-09T18:02:29.381000+02:00

SAP Teched! It is one of my favorite events. But lately... lately - I've been kind of... well not excited. My company is On-Premise. I was worried none of it would work with my current job. Then I gave myself a pep talk. I remembered that I went to Teched to see all the possibilities. And decide if there was anything I needed to learn immediately.

Well... I was excited about all the new things. I always am. Then I heard something that really made going to the event worth it for me. SAP does understand that we have many applications that were custom built. There was something cool called Tier 3. I need to read more on it. I am not the expert by any stretch of the imagination. Here's what I heard - Our old developments are safe. We don't have to just drop them all and try to rewrite them quickly in a better way. The idea is to gradually move to the "new" way of doing things, and phase out our old programs. We'll actually have the time to move to the "clean core" way of doing things. The session I was at when I heard that was "Clean Core extensibility SAP S/4 private cloud".

Big sigh - and happy face from me. I have developed so much code. Code is being used now. It doesn't need to change immediately. It can be done over time. Plus as a bonus we get a friend that will help us - like they are sitting right next to you to help you understand how to do something. The AI capability built for all of us - Joule. Also help you find where that pesky data is hiding.

It was interesting to me that many people were wondering if JAVA and ABAP developers would be obsolete in the future. My answer to myself was no of course not! We still have a lot of old code. Then I look at Joule and think about how many interesting things we can write with the basics taken care of by the AI software. So maybe in time - the old languages will go away. If they do, that's OK too. I new other languages before. No big change for me. What has changed is AI. Joule can spring board us into using all the fun new tools! My learning time could be significantly reduced. Then when thought about - I thought of all the repetitive tasks we do. If they were eliminated, I would have time to work on the "harder" solutions.

Anyway - my short quick recap. There was a ton to learn. (as usual) Another fun fact - on the exercises. I can do them later on my own time. (YES! Github) That's a big plus. Honestly, it's going to be a while before I do that. But once I do - I'll be happy to share my experience.

What did you learn about?

Come Say Hi at an SAP TechEd Tour Stop

2024-10-10T16:55:42.974000+02:00

It’s a wrap! Yes, sadly, SAP TechEd Virtual is already over, but it’s been a blast! But the good news is: If you want to continue to learn, network, and bring out your best, you can still participate in one of five SAP TechEd on Tour or SAPinsider events worldwide – with learning sessions and meet-ups with SAP experts. Here’s what you need to know to come and say “Hi”:

SAP is offering five separate tour stops around the globe, organized in collaboration with SAP user groups. Each stop will offer hands-on learning opportunities, deep-dive lecture sessions, and meet-the-experts all presented by SAP experts, partners, and many customers. We are also bringing back the Developer Garage for you as a great opportunity to learn by doing.

Choose the US or Europe to meet SAP experts

From November 12-14, join technical practitioners and SAP experts at ASUG Tech Connect 2024 in West Palm Beach for immersive sessions, SAP insights, and networking. Over three days, you'll enhance your skills, stay at the forefront of digital advancements, and grow professionally.

If you prefer a trip to Europe, SAPinsider EMEA 2024 in Copenhagen, Denmark, is for you. From November 12-14, you can develop the skills and expertise needed to thrive in your role. Hear from customers about their successful digital transformations, learn implementation best practices from SAP partners, and connect with peers and SAP experts in a three-day learning event aligned with SAP TechEd Virtual.

Get an overview of the SAP ecosystem in Australia

If you fancy a trip to Down Under, we’re excited to meet you at SAUG-x 2024 this year! From November 19-20 you can learn from unique insights, network with your peers, hear from SAP experts, and get an overview of our ecosystem. Don’t miss these relevant knowledge sharing, learning, and networking sessions – all in Melbourne, Australia!

And if you’re still in the mood for SAP TechEd by December, join us in Birmingham, UK, at UKISUG Connect 2024. At the ICC in Birmingham, expect to learn from experts, network with like-minded peers and collaborate together. Benefit from knowledge-rich keynotes, engaging breakout sessions, a range of workshops and an exhibition hall of over 70 SAP partners.

Last, but not least, head over to the motherland of SAP – Germany – and join us at DSAG-TechXchange 2025 on April 4, 2025! Yes, it might be a couple of months away, but having your next trip planned is always a nice thing, don’t you think?

Whichever location you prefer – we are looking forward to seeing you there! Make use of the unique opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals, gain valuable insights into the tech industry, and get hands-on experience with the latest SAP technologies. Whether you're a developer, architect, IT manager, or business executive, SAP TechEd on Tour has something for everyone. Don't miss out on this opportunity to stay ahead of the curve and propel your tech career to new heights!

For more information on the SAP TechEd on Tour stops, visit this page.

And while you’re at it, make sure to attend SAP CodeJam events in your area - free, hands-on coding experiences where you can collaborate with fellow developers to solve real-world challenges while diving deep into the latest SAP technologies.

Top 10 takeaways #SAPTeched 2024

2024-10-13T17:49:12.153000+02:00

1. Harnessing GenAI: The True Power Lies in Its Application

"You know how they say we can only access 20% of our brain? This lets you access all of it!" That's what Vernon Gant told Eddie Morra when he gave him the NZT-48 pill in the movie Limitless. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, large language models (LLMs) and other foundational models have gone mainstream—giving everyone their own version of NZT-48.

The question is: What do people bring to the table? Are they like Eddie, with a solid foundation in math and law that needs a boost? Or like Gennady, whose extortion skills got turbocharged? This analogy applies to companies as well.

SAP has a solid head start with its Business Technology Platform (BTP). At TechEd, SAP announced a slew of AI-enabled advancements that would have been impossible just 23 months ago.

Screen Capture of the Movie 'limitless' Released 2011

2. Embracing Innovation Through SAP BTP

As technology evolves, building new code or introducing innovative approaches depends on a strong platform foundation. SAP has fully embraced this with its Business Technology Platform (BTP). Originally launched as SAP Cloud Platform, BTP has evolved into a unified platform that consolidates essential components to help businesses scale, innovate, and thrive.

BTP's key pillars—application development, automation, integration, data and analytics, and AI—are driving innovation across industries, enabling companies to adapt to changing needs. With 27,000 live customers and over 2,800 partners, SAP BTP's success continues to grow, empowering businesses to stay competitive.

SAP BTP Portfolio 2024

3. AI Foundation on BTP: Relevant, Reliable, Responsible

"Relevant, Reliable, Responsible" is not just a buzzword for SAP. SAP has taken significant actions to demonstrate this commitment.

Responsible: The AI Foundation model is expanding access to more LLMs. A highlight this year is Mistral Large 2, which will be hosted in SAP's own data centers rather than relying on external APIs, ensuring complete control over your data. Additionally, SAP has announced access to the latest LLMs from Aleph Alpha, Meta, and IBM.
Reliable: The SAP Gen AI Hub now offers various orchestration tools—such as data masking, grounding, and content filtering—to ensure that outputs from LLMs are trustworthy and less prone to hallucinations.
Relevant: SAP has built a comprehensive set of AI services, AI lifecycle management, and business data and content for AI, allowing seamless integration into SAP applications—all accessible via Joule.

SAP AI Foundation

4. Joule Updates: Your Trusted Co-Pilot

Joule, SAP's intelligent co-pilot, turns one this year! It will cover 80% of commonly used workflows and tasks in SAP, featuring 500 skills today with a goal to reach 1,200 by year-end, spanning HR, finance, sales, supply chain, and more.

New announcements include:

Multiple Language Support: Joule now supports multiple languages, expanding its accessibility.
Expanded Data Centers: Increased infrastructure to support Joule's growing capabilities.
Availability in SAP Mobile Start: Joule is now accessible in SAP Mobile Start.
Joule Studio in SAP Build: Enabling two million ABAP developers globally, Joule now supports ABAP developer capabilities in Eclipse.

Future Outlook:

Joule Agents: Specialized in specific domains like HR or Customer service, these agents leverage multi-agent systems, allowing businesses to create custom skills, including integration with other enterprise apps like ServiceNow via APIs. This expansion ensures Joule remains a powerful co-pilot, enabling seamless transactional, informational, and analytical interactions to boost business efficiency and automation.

Joule Agents

5. Unified Application Development Under SAP Build, Including ABAP

Two years ago, SAP introduced a low-code environment and last year added AI-powered code development for Java and JavaScript. This year, the latest SAP Build release includes ABAP Cloud, which comes with its own large language model trained on 25 million lines of ABAP code, offering immense power for the SAP ecosystem.

What does this mean? You can now extend your core S/4HANA systems using an AI-powered approach in ABAP Cloud in two ways:

On-Stack: Build custom extensions directly within the core system.
Side-by-Side: Develop modular, customizable extensions on SAP BTP.

The key is to maintain a clean core. The goal is to make all applications lifecycle-compliant, meaning they are built to last without requiring adaptations during innovation cycles. This applies to both private and public cloud. For private cloud, SAP Build supports RFC connectivity, enabling seamless third-party integration with S/4HANA. For public cloud, there is the SAP Build Extensibility Wizard, which helps key users and developers create both on-stack and side-by-side extensions within S/4HANA in an embedded experience.

ABAP Cloud in SAP Build

6. Data in the GenAI Age

In the era of Generative AI, creating intelligent applications requires careful data handling. While foundational models perform well, enterprise data needs precise management.

HANA Cloud Vector Engine: enables in-database vectorization with a proprietary SAP-specific text model, simplifying the creation of vector embeddings. This allows LLMs to provide more accurate, context-aware outputs for enterprise use. A notable example is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), where the engine retrieves relevant business data to improve AI results.
Knowledge Graph Engine: This engine organizes data as interconnected facts, helping users navigate relationships and extract insights easily. In the GenAI space, knowledge graphs can power domain-specific question-answering systems, combining business data from manuals, documents, and records to generate precise, context-aware responses.
GenAI Toolkit for HANA Cloud: Similar to ABAP Cloud's AI-enabled code generation, this toolkit provides users access via Joule, allowing them to query datasets and receive results through AI-driven interactions.

SAP Knowledge Graph

7. Analytics in the GenAI age

Both SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud have received significant enhancements this year.

SAP Analytics Cloud now features SAP Analytics Cloud Compass, set to be generally available in Q1 2025. This feature enables business users to model complex risk scenarios using the Monte Carlo simulation method. With a user-friendly interface, non-technical users can perform real-time risk analysis without needing prior setup or technical expertise.
SAP Datasphere gets a boost with new embedded data lake capabilities, including the Integrated Object Store for storing large amounts of data, Spark Data Processing capabilities, and SQL Files for live access to data in the integrated object store without duplication. These features allow organizations of all sizes to implement a business data fabric in a simple, cost-efficient, and scalable way, powered by SAP HANA Cloud.

SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datashpere

8. SAP Integration Suite Enhancements

Many SAP customers leveraging SAP Integration Suite have experienced a significant return on investment—up to 345%, according to Forrester.

In the era of Generative AI, you can now optimize your existing integrations with AI-generated recommendations. This allows you to run script optimizations, modify connections, relaunch applications, and immediately observe the changes in system performance after the optimizations, providing a significant boost. (This feature will be available as part of SAP Integration Suite Premium Edition.)

Additionally, there's a new commercial offering: the SAP Integration Suite Starter Edition for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP GROW customers. This edition provides access to all pre-packaged SAP integrations, along with a fixed number of customizable integrations.

SAP Integration Suite

9. Business Transformation Management

LeanIX, Signavio, and WalkMe now form a cohesive block where customers need it most—business transformation management. With LeanIX, you can automatically discover your current application landscape. Signavio helps you discover and design your business processes, and WalkMe enables people to seamlessly navigate and adopt these processes, supporting activities such as employee onboarding, performance management, and job changes in SAP SuccessFactors.

SAP Business Transformation Management

10. AI Use Cases in Action Across Applications

A sample customer, "TeachIT Technologies," was used to demonstrate the power of Generative AI in various application spaces. The scenario: TeachIT Technologies, a mid-sized software implementation company, is facing challenges in project management, resource allocation, and international expansion.

Cloud ERP: Project managers track success criteria with GenAI-powered in-app extensibility. SAP BTP allows for custom application development, streamlining processes without manual coding.
UI and AI-Assisted Development: Developers use SAP Fiori Tools and LLMs to quickly transform sketches into functional applications, simplifying the development process (future-looking).
Global Expansion & Compliance: SAP Central Business Configuration (CBC) and GenAI automatically configure regional business processes for expansion, ensuring compliance with local regulations. AI in SAP’s compliance tools resolves tax errors like incorrect GST numbers.
Sales & Operations: SAP Sales Cloud and SuccessFactors use AI tools to help project managers manage teams, set goals, and track budgets, making decision-making easier.

Almost all applications, in one form or another, have their own 'NZT-48 pill'!

Please explore these in the newly launched SAP Business AI Features in SAP Discovery center.

https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/index.html

SAP Business AI Features

SAP TechEd 2024 Announcements - Consolidated and Simplified

2024-10-17T08:28:35.930000+02:00

In this blog, I have consolidated everything related to SAP TechEd 2024 in one place! Hope this will help the community.

Note: Don't miss the list of all the links of news, recordings, source-code, demo etc. towards the end of this blog.

First let's have a quick summary of all the key announcements.

Let's go in detail.

SAP Build + ABAP Cloud

SAP Build unifies the entire development and extension capabilities and will now also include ABAP Cloud.
Technically, it means that SAP Build will integrate ABAP development tools and ABAP development environments for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP BTP.
Developers will also be able to create and monitor their ABAP Cloud projects directly from SAP Build.
It will be available by Q4 2024.
SAP Build Lobby will be the central starting point for all extension projects.

Demo of SAP Build Lobby

SAP Build for S/4HANA Extension Development

A new extensibility wizard is available now which will let developers access SAP Build directly from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
With this, developers can extend custom fields, business logic and processes either on-stack (deployed in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, ABAP environment) or side-by-side (deployed in SAP BTP).
In Q4 2024, the extensibility wizard will let developers create custom SAP Fiori and SAPUI5 applications, leveraging the full set of features available in SAP Build.

New Generative AI Capabilities of SAP Build with Joule

New capabilities in SAP Build Code such as code explanation and documentation search will reduce development time for Java and JavaScript developers (Q4 2024).
Developers will also be able to automate workflows in SAP Build Process Automation with assistance from generative AI (Q4 2024)
ABAP developers will be able to generate high-quality code and unit tests with Joule that comply with SAP’s ABAP Cloud Development model, and also generate explanations for legacy code, making it easier to modernize legacy codebases and migrate to a clean core (Q1 2025)
Developers will also be able to enhance Joule with custom skills using Joule studio in SAP Build, integrating it seamlessly with both SAP and non-SAP applications (Q1 2025)

For more information on SAP Build, refer to SAP Build.

Joule with SAP Build Work Zone

Joule will also be integrated into SAP Build Work Zone (Q4 2024)
It will be available in SAP Build Work Zone standard edition, the SAP Start site and the SAP Mobile Start app.

Joule with Collaborative AI Agents

SAP will infuse Joule with multiple autonomous AI agents that will combine their unique expertise to collaboratively accomplish complex workflows (Q4 2024)
With an in-built agentic capability, Joule can now solve complex business problems for you through planning, self-reflection, logical reasoning and collaboration.
Developers will be able to extend Joule by building their own autonomous AI agent use cases with SAP Build (Q1 2025)

Joule Agent Demo

Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

Joule will be available for all SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers (Q4 2024)
Joule capabilities will expand to support key functions including sales professionals, warehouse clerks and project managers (Q1 of 2025)

Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition

Following the introduction of Joule into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition in July, SAP launched a feature pack with new use cases that let business users instruct Joule with simple commands.
The feature pack includes a new implementation wizard that installs a model outlining criteria to evaluate extensions built with low-code, no-code and pro-code tools on SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP.
Joule will be incorporated into the top 300 most-frequently-used SAP Fiori apps (Q4 2024)
Joule will also be able to take master data change requests within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, so users don’t have to navigate across multiple menus.

Joule in SAP BTP

Joule will be available to use with SAP HANA Cloud in SAP BTP cockpit (Q4 2024)
Joule will be incorporated into SAP BTP cockpit (Q4 2024)
Joule can be directed to perform transactional scenarios like creating a subaccount, onboarding users, and answering questions about SAP BTP administrations in general.

Joule in Other SAP Solutions

Joule will be available in the SAP Service Cloud solution and SAP Concur solutions (Q1 2025)
SAP now offers Joule across the SAP Integrated Business Planning solution, the SAP Digital Manufacturing solution, and the SAP Asset Performance Management application.
SAP will continue to roll out Joule across the entire SAP Supply Chain portfolio.
Joule will be available in the SAP Sales Cloud solution with navigational and task-management assistance (Q4 2024)
Joule will help SAP LeanIX solutions users manage and optimize their IT landscape (Q4 2024)
Joule will be available with SAP Signavio (Q4 2024)
Joule will be available in SAP Mobile Start (Q4 2024)

Joule studio in SAP Build

SAP will release Joule studio in SAP Build (Q4 2024).
Joule studio will provide a dedicated environment for businesses to create, deploy, monitor and manage custom skills for Joule developed with low-code, no-code capabilities.
Custom skills, which complement Joule’s out-of-the-box capabilities from SAP, extend conversational AI to organization-specific workflows.
Additionally, customers can now integrate any third-party system into Joule for an entirely integrated conversational user experience.

SAP Knowledge Graph

SAP announces the addition of a knowledge graph engine to SAP HANA Cloud (Q1 2025)
The knowledge graph engine will let users identify and understand complex relationships in their data not otherwise discoverable using traditional data modeling tools.
SAP announces SAP Knowledge Graph, a new solution that will unlock the full value of SAP data by connecting it with the rich business context captured in SAP applications.
Accessible through SAP Datasphere and Joule in Q1 2025, it will help root AI in SAP-specific business semantics, reducing the risk of inaccurate or irrelevant results.
In its initial release, this solution will focus on SAP S/4HANA, providing a semantic layer that connects over 450,000 ABAP tables, 80,000 CDS views and thousands of SAP Fiori applications, along with OData APIs and entity sets.

SAP HANA Cloud Knowledge Graph Engine

Knowledge graph engine will be added to SAP HANA Cloud (Q1 2025)
By combining the vector engine and the knowledge graph engine, you can harness the power of structured and unstructured data together.

SAP Expands Strategic AI Partnerships

Anthropic: SAP introduces Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet in Amazon Bedrock to generative AI hub.
HCLTech: HCLTech announces a newly built AI Center of Excellence in Munich focused on developing AI use cases for the AI Foundation on SAP BTP.
IBM: SAP announces the addition of IBM Granite, IBM’s flagship series of transparent and efficient LLMs, to the growing repository of AI models available in generative AI hub.
Meta: SAP continues to execute its multi-vendor strategy for LLMs with the addition of Meta Llama 3.1 70B, which is built to deliver performance and cost efficiency.
Mistral AI: SAP continues to expand its partnership with Mistral AI by adding Mistral Large 2 to generative AI hub.
PwC: PwC announces it is using generative AI capabilities based on SAP’s generative AI hub.

Generative AI Hub + ABAP

Developers will be able to access generative AI hub capabilities from custom ABAP applications using the ABAP AI SDK powered by the intelligent scenario lifecycle management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud functionality.
Using the ABAP AI SDK, ABAP developers can easily infuse AI capabilities into their custom applications and extensions.

Generative AI Hub – New LLMs Support

New LLMs will be available for generative AI hub by the end of 2024, including:

Aleph Alpha Pharia-1
Amazon Titan Image Generator
IBM Granite
Mistral Large 2
OpenAI Dall-E 3

Generative AI Hub – New Data Centers

New data centers for generative AI hub by the end of Q4 2024:

AWS: Singapore
Google Cloud Platform: Australia (Sydney); Japan (Osaka)
Microsoft Azure: Australia (Sydney); Switzerland (Zurich)

Generative AI Hub – Other Updates

We will be able to integrate advanced AI capabilities into web apps with new SDK support for ABAP, Java, and JavaScript in generative AI hub (Q4 2024)
Orchestration improvements to the generative AI hub capability in SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad that will enable document grounding and indexing pipelines (Q4 2024)

New generative AI functionality for customers move to the cloud faster

SAP announced a new generative AI functionality that helps customers move to the cloud faster (Q1 2025).
Accessed through the SAP Cloud ALM solution, customers and consultants will be able to get expert answers, proactive guidance, and task automation aligned with the RISE with SAP Methodology.

SAP Expands its Portfolio of Learning and Certification Offerings

SAP launches new role-based certifications, free training materials and hands-on opportunities for developers and tech professionals.
These includes 60 new self-paced learning journeys, trial experiences and solution demonstrations that help tech professionals benefit from the latest fully integrated and practical training.

SAP Datasphere

SAP announced new embedded data lake capabilities for SAP Datasphere (Q4 2024)
Built on SAP HANA Cloud SQL on files and data lake file service capabilities, it will expand the business data fabric architecture with a data lake option, complementing existing storage solutions.
This helps businesses access, manage, and analyze data across cloud and hybrid environments while preserving its context and logic, improving decision-making, operational efficiency, and AI-driven innovation.

New embedded data lake capabilities

An integrated object store, which provides a simpler way to store large amounts of data, making it easier for businesses to expand their storage as needed.
Spark compute, which facilitates efficient data transformation and processing based on existing SAP Datasphere data integration capabilities.
SQL on files functionality, which lets developers access data in the integrated object store without needing to physically copy the data.

These capabilities let users import and integrate data at scale while maintaining a consistent user experience that ensures seamless data integration from both SAP sources (including SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Warehouse) and non-SAP sources while preserving the original structure and context of the data.

SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP announced general availability of the new SAP Analytics Cloud compass feature (Q1 2025)
SAP Analytics Cloud compass feature can be used to model complex risk scenarios and simulate a broad range of probable outcomes.

SAP Integration Suite

SAP Integration Suite, starter edition will offer an unlimited number of prepackaged SAP integrations and a fixed number of customizable integrations for GROW with SAP and SAP SuccessFactors customers (Q4 2024)
New integration adapters will allow users manage data from various third-party technology platforms, including Anaplan, Coupa, HubSpot, NetSuite ERP, Snowflake, and more.
AI supported custom script optimization (2025)
AI support iFlow creation is now Generally Available

SAP TechEd 2024 - Recordings and News

SAP TechEd keynote replay - https://www.youtube.com/live/VUp4nt3zNCg

SAP TechEd News Guide 2024 - https://www.sap.com/events/teched/news-guide.html

SAP TechEd 2023 Executive Keynote - Highlights - https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/sap-teched-2023-executive-keynote-highlights/ba-p/13576476

SAP TechEd Keynote 2024 – Technology Highlights - https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/sap-teched-keynote-2024-technology-highlights/ba-p/13891880

Joule with Collaborative Capabilities - TechEd Announement - https://news.sap.com/2024/10/sap-teched-copilot-joule-collaborative-capabilities-enterprise-ai/

SAP Build’s Next Leap: Generative AI and ABAP - https://news.sap.com/2024/10/sap-build-generative-ai-abap/

SAP Business AI: Release Highlights Q3 2024 - https://news.sap.com/2024/10/sap-business-ai-q3-release/

SAP Galvanizes its Developer Community with New SAP Build Capabilities - https://www.sap.com/events/teched/news-guide/application-development-and-automation.html

SAP Transforms Joule with Collaborative AI Agents - https://www.sap.com/events/teched/news-guide/ai.html#sap-transforms-joule-with-collaborative-ai-agents

SAP Knowledge Graph to Unlock Business Context Across SAP Ecosystem - https://www.sap.com/events/teched/news-guide/ai.html#sap-knowledge-graph-unlock-business-context-across-sap-ecosystem

Cloud ERP announcements - https://www.sap.com/events/teched/news-guide/cloud-erp.html

Data and Analytics announcements - https://www.sap.com/events/teched/news-guide/data-and-analytics.html

SAP Integration Suite announcements - https://www.sap.com/events/teched/news-guide/integration.html

List of GitHub Repositories for SAP TechEd Hands-on Sessions

Build your own generative AI scenario in a Snap - https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-AI180

Use SAP Integration Suite with SAP IBP and third-party systems - https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-IN280

Build AI-enabled intelligent data apps - https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-AI280

Set up Joule to answer questions in your own policy documents - https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-XP180

Build SAP Fiori Apps with ABAP Cloud powered by Joule's ABAP developer capabilities - https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-AD180

SAP TechEd 2024 Developer keynote [deconstructed]: Keeping the promise - https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-developer-keynote

Explore SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud End-to-End- https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-DA180

From clicks to code: Managing your SAP BTP infrastructure with Terraform- https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-XP280

Future-proof your SAP PI/PO investments with SAP Integration Suite- https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-IN180

Develop applications and processes with SAP Build and Joule- https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-AD181

Cloud ERP Extensibility- https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-DT280

Integrating SAP S/4HANA Cloud with SAP IBP using SAP Integration Suite- https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-DT180

Build a chatbot with SAP Build Apps and SAP AI Core- https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2024-developer-keynote/tree/main/topics/DEV100A-build-chatbot-apps-aicore

Hope this will help! Let me know if I have missed anything important 😊

SAP TechEd 2024: The Future of Intelligent Enterprises Unveiled

2024-10-17T13:17:11.995000+02:00

SAP TechEd 2024, held both virtually and in Las Vegas, brought together technology enthusiasts, developers, and enterprise leaders to explore the latest innovations in SAP technologies. This year’s event was packed with keynotes, expert sessions, hands-on workshops, and a glimpse into the future of intelligent enterprises. Whether you attended in person or online, the excitement was commendable, and the energy was contagious.

Opening Keynote: Building the Intelligent, Sustainable Enterprise

The event kicked off with an inspiring keynote from SAP CEO Christian Klein, who emphasized SAP’s commitment to innovation, sustainability, and enabling businesses to become intelligent enterprises. He highlighted the importance of digital transformation and how SAP is paving the way with groundbreaking solutions that prioritize sustainability, AI, and enhanced user experiences.

Key Highlights:

SAP Business AI: Announcement of new AI capabilities integrated into SAP S/4HANA, designed to automate routine tasks, improve data-driven decision-making, and optimize business processes.
Sustainability at the Core: Introduction of new sustainability features that help companies monitor and minimize their carbon footprint, track resource usage, and improve supply chain transparency.
SAP Fiori Evolution: Enhanced user interface with a focus on accessibility and a more intuitive design, making it easier for users to navigate and interact with SAP applications.

SAP Virtual – The new and improved Dashboard

New Announcements and Innovations

SAP TechEd 2024 had no shortage of exciting new announcements. Here are some of the key innovations revealed during the event:

Expanded AI Capabilities

SAP Business AI was a central theme throughout the event, with new AI features showcased across multiple products. From predictive analytics in SAP S/4HANA to conversational AI for customer support, SAP demonstrated how AI is being seamlessly integrated to enhance business processes.

SAP Build Process Automation

A major highlight was the announcement of updates to SAP Build, aimed at making process automation more accessible to users of all technical levels. The low-code/no-code platform now includes pre-built templates, drag-and-drop tools, and enhanced integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

SAP Datasphere Enhancements

The data management solution, SAP Datasphere, received new capabilities, making it easier to connect, manage, and analyze data across various sources. The enhancements include improved data governance, real-time analytics, and deeper integration with third-party data platforms.

Developer and Learning Tracks

One of the best parts of SAP TechEd is the wealth of learning opportunities. This year’s event featured over 500 sessions, including workshops, expert-led talks, and networking opportunities. Some popular tracks included:

Future-Proofing with SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform)

Sessions focused on helping developers leverage the SAP Business Technology Platform to build, extend, and integrate applications. There were workshops on using SAP Integration Suite, building custom apps with SAP BTP, and harnessing the power of SAP AI.

The Path to Clean Code and Efficient Development

An emphasis was placed on clean code principles, efficient development, and best practices for building scalable solutions. Developers got hands-on experience with SAP’s latest development tools, ensuring they are ready to build future-ready applications.

Enhancing User Experience with SAP Fiori

Experts guided attendees through the latest updates to SAP Fiori, including the new design elements and features that make applications more intuitive and responsive. There were live demos showcasing how to customize the Fiori Launchpad and build applications with improved accessibility.

Hands-On Workshops and Demos

SAP TechEd 2024 didn’t just talk about innovation—it allowed attendees to experience it firsthand. Attendees participated in hands-on workshops to build applications using SAP BTP, explore machine learning with SAP AI, and configure real-time data flows in SAP Datasphere.

Some Popular Workshops:

"Building Scalable Applications with SAP BTP": Participants created cloud-native applications and learned best practices for integrating them with SAP S/4HANA.
"Automate Business Processes with SAP Build": A practical session on designing and automating workflows without writing a single line of code.
"Data-Driven Insights with SAP Analytics Cloud": Attendees explored how to visualize and analyze data using the SAP Analytics Cloud, with a focus on real-time data.

Networking and Community Engagement

One of the major draws of SAP TechEd is the opportunity to connect with peers, SAP experts, and industry leaders. Networking lounges, breakout sessions, and even virtual chatrooms were bustling with activity as attendees exchanged ideas, discussed challenges, and explored collaboration opportunities.

SAP Community Awards
The event also celebrated the achievements of the SAP community with awards recognizing developers, partners, and businesses that have made significant contributions to the ecosystem. It was a proud moment for many, reinforcing the strong collaborative spirit within the SAP community.

Key Takeaways from SAP TechEd 2024

AI and Automation Are the Future

SAP’s commitment to integrating AI into its core products signals a future where routine tasks can be automated, allowing businesses to focus on strategic initiatives.

Focus on Sustainability

With sustainability becoming a global imperative, SAP’s solutions are enabling businesses to measure and minimize their environmental impact, helping them to meet regulatory requirements and improve their corporate responsibility.

Empowering the Developer Community

From expanded capabilities in SAP BTP to enhanced tools for building and automating processes, SAP TechEd 2024 reinforced the message that developers are at the heart of driving digital transformation.

The Future Innovation with SAP Builders
Innovation is the key to future. There is SAP Builders group to engage with a community of peers to unleash innovation: SAP Builders - SAP Community

In-person events for SAP TechEd 2024
There are multiple in person events for SAP TechEd2024 the timelines are as follows:
• ASUG Tech Connect 2024: November 12–14, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida
• SAUG-x 2024: November 19–20, 2024 in Melbourne, Australia
• UKISUG Connect 2024: December 1–3, 2024 in Birmingham, United Kingdom
• SAPinsider EMEA 2024: November 12–14, 2024 in Copenhagen, Denmark
• DSAG-TechXchange 2025: April 4, 2025 in Wiesbaden, Germany

Sponsors of this TechEd 2024

Summary

SAP TechEd 2024 was a showcase of the future of enterprise technology, highlighting the tools and innovations that will shape businesses for years to come. Whether you were there in person or joined online, the event offered a comprehensive look at how SAP is driving the digital transformation journey.

Excited to look forward to whats in store with SAP TechEd 2025!
SAP TechEd Subscription
Cheers!

Driving ABAP Innovation: Key highlights and future trends from SAP TechEd 2024

2024-10-24T16:39:37.266000+02:00

Dear Developer Community,

I am thrilled to share with you some of the inspiring ABAP highlights from SAP TechEd 2024. The sessions were packed with valuable information and insights that are sure to empower and motivate every ABAP developer out there.

If you haven't had a chance to watch the video SAP TechEd 2024 | ABAP Highlights, I highly recommend it as it provides a concise overview of the latest developments in ABAP and the incredible possibilities that lie ahead:

In this blog post, I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the incredible work of our talented speakers and reflect on the wealth of knowledge they shared.

ABAP Cloud in SAP Build

Alexander Rother’s, Björn Schulz’s and Andre Borchert’s session AD100 | Unlock SAP Build and ABAP Cloud interoperability to elevate your extensions emphasized the immense potential of the SAP ecosystem. The inclusion of ABAP Cloud in the SAP Build family marks a significant leap forward, forming the world’s strongest alliance for customer and partner development. By embracing the fusion development principle and harnessing the power of Generative AI, developers can expect unparalleled productivity and unprecedented outcomes. This transformative collaboration paves the way for innovation and advancement, driving the SAP ecosystem to new heights.

This integration was also discussed in session AD105 – Enhance your fusion team collaboration with ABAP Cloud and SAP Build by Anne Keller and Tim Back. They showed a demo of how to integrate your ABAP Cloud projects into the lobby of SAP Build solutions.

Clean Core Extensibility

The session DT200 | Clean Core extensibility in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition by Olga Dolinskaja and Thomas Fiedler provided essential guidance on transforming legacy development to ABAP Cloud and Clean Core by using classic SAP APIs for the 3-Tier Extensibility Model. It also captured the upcoming S/4HANA Joule Agent in ABAP Development Tools (ADT) and how it will boost the development efficiency and create exciting possibilities for the future.

The 3-Tier Extensibility Model and how it serves to transform classic ABAP custom code into Clean Core compliant custom, was also highlighted in session DT100 | Unlocking the intelligent enterprise: Cloud ERP innovations for the future by Carine Tchoutouo Djomo and Jan Gilg. By integrating of Generative AI across the entire SAP development lifecycle, they showcased the limitless possibilities for future innovation.

In session AD106 | Clean Core extensibility of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition with ABAP Cloud, Volker Drees provided valuable insights into the Clean Core extensibility of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition with ABAP Cloud. The overview of ABAP Cloud usage and the 3-Tier Extensibility Model, coupled with the integration of classic APIs (BAPIs) following the Clean Core principles, presented a roadmap for developers to create extensions in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Andre Fischer's session DT280 | Build Clean Core extensions with ABAP Cloud for SAP S/4HANA Cloud demonstrated the power of the new generators in ADT for building Clean Core extensions with ABAP Cloud for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The session showed how easy it is to use the Field Extension Wizard and the UI Services Wizard to create extensions for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, empowering developers to unleash their creativity and take their applications to the next level.

Attendees of session DT201 | Extensibility for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, presented by Alda Dollani and Thomas Schneider, gained valuable insights into finding the right extensibility tool for various use cases and identifying the right API or extension point. The session also showcased a cutting-edge extensibility wizard and AI capability, which is sure to revolutionize the way attendees approach their extensibility challenges.

ABAP AI

In the session AD107 | Boost your coding efficiency: Explore Joule’s ABAP developer capabilities, Jasmin Gruschke and Sebastian Baskovich focused on SAP's development of AI assistant tools for ABAP developers, with an exciting live demo and lab preview of Joule’s ABAP developer capabilities. ABAP AI truly is a game changer.

Carine Tchoutouo Djomo's sessions AD180 | Build extensions with ABAP Cloud and Joule's ABAP developer capabilities was an inspiring demonstration of the potential to accelerate application development using Joule ABAP developer capabilities. In her session, Carine demonstrated the implementation of business events with ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model (RAP) for loosely coupled on-stack and side-by-side integration scenarios, as well as the display of hierarchical business data in SAP Fiori apps using Treeview.

In their session AI104 – Revolutionize ABAP development with Joule, our generative AI copilot Salma Sohrabi-Jahromi and Jens Weiler elaborated further on Joule's capabilities in ABAP development and how Joule can enrich everyday work.

Let me end this blog post with another video about the key TechEd Keynote messages about ABAP:

My heartfelt thanks to all the speakers and session owners for their invaluable contributions and insights.
All the best,

Sonja Liénard
SVP BTP ABAP

More to read

We recently published a blog post entitled The next step of ABAPs evolution: ABAP Cloud now part of SAP Build, which focuses on ABAP Cloud and its integration with SAP Build. I encourage you to read it if you haven't already.

On behalf of the entire ABAP community, I would also like to thank Michael Ameling for his continuous support and dedication to spreading the amazing ABAP news at TechEd 2024. His contributions have been invaluable, and we are incredibly grateful for his efforts. Check out his latest community blog post Unveiling today: SAP Build meets ABAP Cloud!

SAP Developer News, October 24th, 2024

2024-10-24T21:10:00.032000+02:00

Podcast Version: https://podcast.opensap.info/sap-developers/2024/10/24/sap-developer-news-october-24th-2024/

Description

SAP Build Apps now supports Actions!:

Chatbot Development Made Easy with SAP AI Core and Build Apps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE7nHx9XHAY&ab_channel=SAPDevelopers
Blog Post by Qui Shi: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/sap-build-apps-integration-with-sap-ai-core-services-part-4-integration-via/ba-p/13885101
Official feature documentation: https://help.sap.com/docs/build-apps/service-guide/actions

Devtoberfest Wrap Up

Devtoberfest Homepage: https://community.sap.com/t5/devtoberfest/gh-p/Devtoberfest
Devtoberfest Event Calendar: https://community.sap.com/t5/devtoberfest/eb-p/devtoberfest-events?calendar=true
Devtoberfest Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6RpkC85SLQDHz97qsNTNAE2jnUKj8X5d

SAP TechEd On Tour

SAP TechEd: https://www.sap.com/events/teched.html
ASUG Tech Connect 2024: https://events.asug.com/event/9a5f27ca-d742-45bb-85e7-a6597b952900/summary?RefId=sap-splash-page-home&utm_campaign=ATC_24&utm_medium=sap&utm_source=referral&utm_term=sap-splash-page-home
SAPinsider EMEA 2024: https://reg.eventmobi.com/emea-2024?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=teched&utm_content=sapmarketing
SAUG-x 2024: https://www.saug.com.au/WhatsOn/SAUG-x2024
UKISUG Connect 2024: https://www.ukisugconnect.co.uk/techx-at-connect?utm_source=TechEd_Webpage&utm_medium=Website&utm_campaign=TECHx_at_Connect
DSAG-TechXchange 2025: https://dsag.de/neuigkeiten/sap-teched-goes-dsag-techxchange-english/

ABAPconf 2024

Event Site: https://abapconf.org/abapconf2024/

CHAPTER TITLES

0:00 Intro
0:10 SAP Build Apps now supports Actions!
1:26 Devtoberfest Wrap Up
3:45 TechEd On Tour
4:49 ABAPConf 2024

Transcription

[Intro] This is the SAP Developer News for October 24th, 2024.

[Shrini] I hope you got a chance to watch this Devtoberfest session we did earlier this week on chatbot development made easy. If you haven't watched it, go ahead and watch the recording as I am using the same project to show you the newly added actions feature that is now available in SAP Build Apps. In the demo, I showed you how to create a data entity to connect to the Generative AI Hub and now with this feature, you could replace the data entity with an action project, configure the input, test, and save the output fields. Remember to add SAP Application Development Actions enabled to true to the destination in order for it to appear in the access project. After you release and publish the access to the library, you can enable it from the integrations tab. Now, there is also a trigger actions function available in the logic canvas and you could trigger this action while providing the BTP destination to get a response from the backend system. The response will now be available within outputs trigger action. Go ahead and try out the new actions feature in SAP Build Apps now, and you could replace a data entity in one of your build apps project with this new actions feature. You could refer to this blog post by Chu Shi, which has step by step instructions.

[Thomas] By the time you're seeing this new segment, our Devtoberfest for 2024 will have probably nearly come to a close. It's hard to imagine but this is the fifth year for Devtoberfest. I know it seems to us like just the other day we were planning our very first Devtoberfest and here we've grown to be this major part of your overall SAP TechEd experience. I'm really enjoying where we're at with Devtoberfest and TechEd. You know with TechEd you get the big announcements; you get introduction to new topics and then you can attend Devtoberfest session sessions to get a deeper dive into those same topics. It also allows us to cover a variety of maybe older topics, but ones that are still relevant to customers and partners out in the SAP ecosystem. So I'm really happy with the state where we are with Devtoberfest. It's great that we had over 60,000 unique people join and attend Devtoberfest sessions. We had tons of people, you know, almost 4,000 people enter the contest. We'll be announcing winners of the Devtoberfest contest soon. If all the validation of winners happens in enough time, we plan to announce those at the ASUG Tech Connect event, one of the SAP TechEd On Tour stops.

Speaking of SAP TechEd On Tour, that's really the next stage of continuing your TechEd journey. journey. If a Tekken on Tour stop is coming to an area near you, I encourage you to sign up and join to get that in-person experience with many of these new announced technologies. If it's not able to come your way, then we have lots of Code Jams planned for you next year, or if one's not coming to an area near you, consider hosting and request one to come to your area. We have plans to expand the parts of the world that we cover with Code Jams next year, hopefully making it to a few locations that we haven't been to in over four or five years. So with that, thank you, developer community, for another successful Devtoberfest, and we look forward to seeing you again in 2025.

[DJ] In this video I'm going to talk about innovating cutting-edge tech from the high seas. He could have kept his anchors away, but he didn't. Right. Tech out. I'll be coming up hot for a minute.

[Rich] Hey folks, Rich Heilman here. I hope everyone is having fun with the last week of Devtoberfest. But today, I wanted to make sure that you all know about the ABAP conference, which will take place on December 5th, 2024. This is a fantastic community-driven event specifically for ABAP developers, which will be streamed online. But you can also enter a drawing for a ticket to one of the on-site venues. The content is delivered in both German and English, depending on the session, and there are a ton of familiar names on the agenda. Way too many to mention here, so head over to the abopconference.org website for more information and details around the agenda.

TechEd On Tour in our very own Melbourne

2024-10-25T09:49:38.238000+02:00

Choose the US or Europe to meet SAP experts

Get an overview of the SAP ecosystem in Australia

For more information on the SAP TechEd on Tour stops, visit this page.

SAP Developer News, October 31st, 2024

2024-10-31T20:00:00.035000+01:00

Podcast Version: https://podcast.opensap.info/sap-developers/2024/10/31/sap-developer-news-october-31st-2024/

DESCRIPTION

New CodeJam: Expose capabilities of SAP AI Core with the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model

Github repository: https://github.com/SAP-samples/codejam-cap-llm/tree/main
SAP CodeJam topics: https://community.sap.com/t5/sap-codejam-blog-posts/sap-codejam-topics/ba-p/221407
Host a CodeJam: https://community.sap.com/t5/sap-codejam-blog-posts/so-you-want-to-host-a-codejam-everything-you-need-to-know/ba-p/221415
SAP Cloud SDK for AI: https://github.com/SAP/ai-sdk-js/tree/main

SAP TechEd On Tour

SAP TechEd: https://www.sap.com/events/teched.html
ASUG Tech Connect 2024: https://events.asug.com/event/9a5f27ca-d742-45bb-85e7-a6597b952900/summary?RefId=sap-splash-page-home&utm_campaign=ATC_24&utm_medium=sap&utm_source=referral&utm_term=sap-splash-page-home
SAPinsider EMEA 2024: https://reg.eventmobi.com/emea-2024?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=teched&utm_content=sapmarketing
SAUG-x 2024: https://www.saug.com.au/WhatsOn/SAUG-x2024
UKISUG Connect 2024: https://www.ukisugconnect.co.uk/techx-at-connect?utm_source=TechEd_Webpage&utm_medium=Website&utm_campaign=TECHx_at_Connect
DSAG-TechXchange 2025: https://dsag.de/neuigkeiten/sap-teched-goes-dsag-techxchange-english/

ML/AI in SAP Data Management products

Let’s Understand Knowledge Graph in 5 Simple Points: https://medium.com/@raja.gupta20/lets-understand-knowledge-graph-in-5-simple-points-36999c79df8e
Connecting the Facts: SAP HANA Cloud’s Knowledge Graph Engine for Business Context: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/connecting-the-facts-sap-hana-cloud-s-knowledge-graph-engine-for-business/ba-p/13888597
Get Hands-On: Build an Intelligent Data Application powered by the SAP HANA Cloud Vector Engine: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/get-hands-on-build-an-intelligent-data-application-powered-by-the-sap-hana/ba-p/13916066
Accelerate the Budget Approval Process with SAP HANA Cloud vector engine: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-members/accelerate-the-budget-approval-process-with-sap-hana-cloud-vector-engine/ba-p/13884137
Turbocharging Machine Learning on SAP Data with Datasphere, FedML, and NVIDIA: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/turbocharging-machine-learning-on-sap-data-with-datasphere-fedml-and-nvidia/ba-p/13889054
SAP and DataRobot Partnership Updates 2024: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/sap-and-datarobot-partnership-updates-2024/ba-p/13916493

The Open Source Way podcast episode: R/3 on Linux

CHAPTER TITLES

0:00 Intro

0:10 New CodeJam: Expose capabilities of SAP AI Core with the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model

0:55 TechEd On Tour

1:58 ML/AI in SAP Data Management products

3:58 The Open Source Way podcast episode: R/3 on Linux

Transcription

[Intro] This is the SAP Developer News for October 31st, 2024.

[Kevin] If you followed the announcements from SAP TechEd 2024, you know that there is a brand new SAP Cloud SDK for AI for JavaScript, Java, and ABAP. So I thought why not create a brand new code gem to teach you how to utilize AI capabilities within your CAP application using the SAP Cloud SDK for AI JavaScript version. So that code gem is out right now. So go ahead, visit the community.sap.com to see if there is a CodeJam happening right nearby you, or if you want to host one yourself. There is a ton of description on how to do that. And hopefully I'll see you next year in a CodeJam talking about AI and CAP. I can't wait.

[Promo] It's a long way from Philly to Heidelberg, but the show must go on. We're late, aren't we? Yeah, we're late. We all know there's nothing like the real thing. Luckily, we've got our best people on the job. Oh, sorry, Josh. Josh, if you pulled your own weight, we wouldn't have to carry you through this place.

[Witalij] We at SAP are enhancing our cloud native data management products with advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, providing robust tools for developers and data scientists. First, the SAP HANA Cloud Knowledge Graph Engine announced at SAP TechEd Virtual is essential for developers and data scientists among you working with large language models or LLMs generator AI, as it facilitates the extraction of complex insights from bus data sets. Check Shabana's post to find out more.

Next, with the release of SAP HANA Cloud's Vector Engine, our development team built an insightful Movie Inside demo app to showcase the vector-based querying and storage capabilities. This demo illustrates the Vector Engine's role in enhancing LLM responses with contextual data. The entire demo is now available to you, providing a hands-on experience for developers and tech enthusiasts like you to explore the vector engine's capabilities and applications. To see such a practical implementation, check one of the partner applications known as SBF or Smart Budgeting and Forecasting.

Summarizing long documents and querying using the trivial augmented generation with SAP HANA Cloud Vector Engine, this application enables a quicker understanding of the attachments to budget request forms.

In addition, SAP DataSphere, in collaboration with NVIDIA, integrates Federated Machine Learning, or FEDML. This setup allows data scientists to conduct extensive ML experiments on SAP business data while ensuring data security and stellar performance.

Finally, the integration of data robots' AI models into SAP environments empowers developers and data scientists to embed AI-driven insights directly into their workflow. The partnership enhances the technical capabilities of SAP data management tools, making it easier to deploy and manage AI models within existing systems.

[DJ] Did you know that SAP, in particular the open source program office within SAP has a podcast show? It's been running now four years and to celebrate their fourth anniversary, they've published a monumentally epic episode. What is the episode about? Well, in my opinion, it's about one of the few major, major milestones in SAP software history, and that is the port of SAP R/3 to Linux. Now, you might think, oh, it's a big deal, but back then, and this was in the early 1990s, back then it was a massive deal. I was super lucky to be around at the time to get to know the two main actors in this affair, in this amazing event, Christoph Rohland and Harald Kuck. And these two, Christoph and Harald, are guests on this particular anniversary episode of the podcast show to talk about how it came to be, what happened. It's an amazing story. I can't recommend this episode strongly enough. Anyway, get the podcast show into your favourite podcast player, have a listen, and while you're at it, also have a look at this blog post from Ulrika, which talks a little bit more about the show, and also specifically about the milestone that Harold and Christoph will relate to you. So, see you online, and by the way, Happy birthday, the open-source way.

SAP Partner Headlines: The Latest News Delivered Straight to You

2024-11-05T20:18:30.246000+01:00

In today's fast-paced business world, staying informed about the latest developments is crucial—especially when it comes to navigating SAP’s extensive ecosystem. We understand that keeping up with the constant flow of news and updates from SAP can be a challenge. That's why we're excited to introduce SAP Partner Headlines, a new video series designed to bring you the most important updates in a concise, easy-to-digest format.

Why SAP Partner Headlines?

As SAP continues to evolve, it’s essential for our partners to stay up to speed on the latest programs, events, and strategic changes. However, with so many valuable updates coming from different corners of the organization, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. SAP Partner Headlines was created to address this need. Each instance will focus on highlighting key developments that impact your business—timely changes, new initiatives, and major announcements that partners should prioritize.

This series is not meant to diminish the value of other news but to make sure you're kept in the loop about the changes that matter most. Our goal is to support you in staying informed and empowered to take full advantage of the opportunities within SAP’s ecosystem.

The First Episode: Key Announcements

In our inaugural episode, we’ll cover two major updates:

The launch of SAP’s new Development Fund for SAP PartnerEdge, which consolidates our market and business development funds into one streamlined approach, aimed at accelerating partner growth and cloud practice development.
SAP TechEd on Tour, where you can continue your learning journey with in-person, deep-dive sessions on SAP’s latest technologies.

Stay Connected

Don’t miss out on the latest SAP partner news—stay informed by subscribing to our newsletter today. We look forward to bringing you the essential updates you need, when you need them, through this exciting new series.

Discover TechEd “Live” at SAPinsider EMEA 2024

2024-11-06T12:45:45.302000+01:00

Following hot on the heels of the hugely successful SAP TechEd Virtual event last month, attention now turns to a number of live events that will feature TechEd content and speakers, starting at the ASUG Tech Connect event in West Palm Beach, the first of SAP’s “TechEd on Tour” locations, as well as featuring in sessions at the SAPinsider EMEA “TechInsider” event in Copenhagen. Both events run from 12- 14 November in these wonderful, if quite different, locations.

I’ve been deeply involved in the planning for the SAPinsider event again, and for this reason alone will focus my blog on that event, though I am hopeful that both events will deliver a rich experience of TechEd content for attendees, and allow them to delve deeply into SAP technologies, particularly relating to SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

At SAPinsider Copenhagen we’re going the extra mile, in trying to deliver a TechEd-style experience for attendees, who I’m happy to say will not only find an agenda littered with TechEd sessions, delivered by many of our stellar TechEd speakers, but also they’ll be able to participate in multiple hands-on sessions as well as having an opportunity to continue their learning experience by networking with SAP’s Developer Advocates who will guide and support attendees as they work through a number of the tutorials available at the Developer Garage on the show floor – which we are pleased will make its very first appearance at this SAPinsider event.

With all this on offer I’m excited for what’s in store in Copenhagen next week – and I hope that you are too!

Plan Ahead – And Set Your Agenda Now!

For those of you registered for the event, and in a manner which is not unlike visiting a Disney theme park, my suggestion for you to get the most out of an SAPinsider event is to plan ahead – not so much to beat the queues as you might at the theme park, but more so to make sure that you see all you want to see, and achieve what you set out to do. And the best way to do this is to prepare your agenda for the event before you go.

The first step is of course to get the event app, “SAPinsider Events”, available on the App Store and Google Play, and once you’ve installed that you’re good to go in terms of adding sessions to your personal agenda. Now for the fun bit – what sessions to see? Perhaps I might help with some ideas.

I’ll assume that everyone will plan to join the day 1 and day 2 keynotes. I’m looking forward to both, the motivational first day keynote from Hein Wagner, starting at 9.00am on Tuesday 12th November, followed the next day by the AI inspired second day keynote, featuring Martin Böhm of Ottobock and Jonathan Von Rüden of SAP, and which starts at the same time of day on the 13th November.

But after the keynotes, what next? Here are my personal 6 TechEd inspired picks for Copenhagen:

Enhancing SAP Development Processes with SAP Build and ABAP Cloud Interoperability to Elevate Your Extensions, 12-Nov-24, 10:30 - 11:15
Hands-On Lab: Develop Applications and Processes with SAP Build and Joule, 12-Nov-24, 15:30 - 17:30
Mastering SAP Business AI for Enhanced Performance and Innovation, 13-Nov-24, 10:30 - 11:15
SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere Solutions: Integration, 13-Nov-24, 14:15 - 15:00
Clean Core Extensibility for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, 13-Nov-24, 16:45 - 17:30
SAP BTP Strategy and Highlights, 14-Nov-24, 09:00 - 09:45

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, as there are many more sessions available for you to select from the agenda, and among which you’ll find more TechEd content, as well as content from other speakers from SAP and our business partners, in addition to many customer case stories too. And in a shameless plug too, you may also note my session “Navigating Your Path to Success with SAP BTP” which I shall deliver alongside Nis Boy Naeve on 13 November at 11:30am. Please join us if you can! Take a look at the SAPinsider event website sessions list, or the event app that you’ve already downloaded to see more.

Your Continued Learning Experience

If you’d like to continue your own personal learning journey after the event, then why not explore other learning opportunities from SAP? For example, learn how to build software applications, side-by-side extensions, and integrations to and from cloud applications by exploring SAP’s free learning content on SAP BTP. It is made for both integration designers and extension developers from all levels of expertise and will help you stay up to date with the latest SAP BTP innovations. And check out even more role-based learning resources and opportunities to get certified in one place on SAP Learning site.

Or if you’re interested in TechEd sessions, but can’t join the events in West Palm Beach or Copenhagen, then perhaps another TechEd on Tour location, in Australia, Germany or the UK would work better for you?

For those of you travelling to Copenhagen next week, I do hope that you find SAPinsider EMEA 2024 to be a truly informative and stimulating experience. And, of course, if you visit the show floor then look me up at the SAP exhibit booth, and I’ll be happy to have a chat with you about SAP BTP, the conference or just about the amazing city of Copenhagen!

My best wishes for safe travels, and I hope that you enjoy the event!

Chris Grundy

Product Marketing, SAP BTP

ASUG Tech Connect 2024 | Keynote Highlights & Resources

2024-11-12T12:47:37.852000+01:00

Today, the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) hosted the first SAP TechEd on Tour stop in Florida! Together with Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG, and Patrick Dineen, SVP Finance Transformation Systems at NBC Universal, we explored how SAP is helping organizations accelerate ERP modernization and drive innovation across industries with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), SAP Joule, SAP Build, and SAP Integration Suite.

In this blog post, I've compiled all relevant links and demos presented during my segment of the keynote – and more!

If you want to learn more about SAP TechEd on Tour and other stops, go to https://www.sap.com/events/teched.html.

Best of TechEd – Virtual keynote recap

The main SAP Business Technology Platform announcements from our virtual keynote focused on three key points:

First: We help customers get faster, better, and automated: SAP BTP serves all their needs to innovate, integrate, and extend their systems.

Second: We are enhancing the developer and user experience with our latest release of SAP Build, which now includes ABAP Cloud.

And third: We are raising the bar for Business AI – for a whole new level of productivity.

You will find all announcements shared at SAP TechEd 2024 in our News Guide and the replay of our opening keynote.

Best of Platform

SAP BTP is your platform of choice for application development, automation, integration, data & analytics, and Business AI.

To support your journey with BTP, we provide a wide range of tools, best practices, resources, and reference architectures designed to help you:

Design and deploy enterprise-grade solutions,
accelerate time-to-value and optimize costs, and
foster collaboration and continuous learning in your architectural practices.

How to get started? At ASUG TechConnect, I highlighted some of the key tools and resources available to get you started effectively:

The SAP BTP Guidance Framework helps you design solutions that align with your company’s digital strategy. You can find more information here on SAP Help, and BTP reference architectures at the SAP Discovery Center. Adopt and adjust the architectures to your requirements by using the BTP solution diagram repository.

Or simply tune into our SAP TechEd session on demand:

Start your journey with SAP BTP and confidently accelerate adoption

The SAP Discovery Center provides you with hands-on guidance to implement BTP services based on real use cases! You can activate them in your BTP landscape with the new quick account setup. With a single click you will get all services provisioned and deployed. Learn more about this in the respective SAP TechEd on-demand sessions:

The SAP Business Accelerator Hub equips you with additional building blocks to realize your digital strategy. More than 25,000 pre-built assets are already available, such as Integration flows, APIs, Business Processes, adapters, validated partner use cases and a lot more.

The SAP BTP GenAI starter kit empowers you to integrate AI capabilities into your infrastructure easily. Get a first overview in this blog post and more detailed information here on GitHub.

Once you’re set up with BTP, a world of possibilities opens up. In our keynote, I highlighted why BTP stands as the premier platform for embedding AI, accelerating developer productivity, building applications, and seamlessly integrating SAP with third-party solutions:

AI Foundation on BTP
The AI Foundation on BTP helps you make the most out of your SAP data and processes. You also get the broadest selection of foundational models from top providers—all in one place. Find out more through our SAP TechEd on-demand sessions:

Joule and Joule studio
By year-end, our AI copilot Joule will cover 80% of SAP's top workflows, enabling users to manage timesheets, view returns, create reports, and compare quotes through natural language. Integrated with SAP Build, it also boosts developer productivity. Discover additional insights in the following SAP TechEd on-demand session:

Extend Joule with SAP Build and develop custom enterprise skills

Joule Agents
Joule is going agentic! Powered by large language models, AI agents tackle complex business problems through planning, self-reflection, reasoning, and collaboration.

SAP Build x ABAP
Two years ago, we launched SAP Build as a unified low-code environment. Last year, we added SAP Build Code for AI-driven app development. Now, SAP Build also integrates directly with SAP S/4HANA, enabling BAPI and function module calls in the S/4HANA Private Cloud. And we now also included ABAP Cloud in our latest release of SAP Build!

We also introduced the new ABAP explain agent, allowing users to quickly understand complex ABAP code by generating explanations through large language models. Learn more in our TechEd on-demand sessions:

Integration Suite
With SAP Integration Suite, we offer you a modern solution to run your integration scenarios across SAP and third-party applications. You benefit from embedded AI, hundreds of connectors, and thousands of pre-built integrations. Already 75% of our customers use SAP Integration Suite to integrate with non-SAP systems. And we are introducing new integration adapters for Anaplan, Coupa, HubSpot, NetSuite ERP, Snowflake, and more.

Innovate now with a modern, AI-assisted integration suite

Best of Suite

With SAP BTP powering our suite of enterprise applications, we also explored how everything connects across our portfolio. A suite-first approach ensures a seamless, productive user experience throughout the workday.

As an example, we presented a demo that shows how the end users of our products can easily navigate across our solution portfolio via SAP Start. Infused by our copilot Joule, users can be more productive when setting up new teams, booking travel, or getting insights through SAP Analytics Cloud, for example. You can watch the full demo here.

View our Integration Strategy Paper

Get started now!

To get started with BTP and Business AI, here are some of our missions in the SAP Discovery Center:

AI on BTP: https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/missiondetail/4338/4621/
GenAI with SAP Build Code: https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/missiondetail/4441/4727/
Gen AI with RAG for CAP: https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/missiondetail/4371/4655/

Here are some additional missions to kick off your journey with BTP:

App Development on BTP: https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/missiondetail/4431/4717/
Integration Suite: https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/missiondetail/3258/3327/
Best Of Suite: https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/missiondetail/4451/4737/

I hope you are all fired up now and ready to get your hands dirty.

We can’t wait to see what you will build!

SAP Developer News, November 14th, 2024

2024-11-15T13:08:21.950000+01:00

DESCRIPTION

Developing Event-Driven Integrations with SAP BTP 📖

SAP Press E-Bite: https://www.sap-press.com/developing-event-driven-integrations-with-sap-btp_6021/
GitHub repository: https://github.com/SAP-samples/event-driven-integrations-e-bite/

Terraform Provider Updates

Terraform Exporter for SAP BTP https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/may-i-introduce-you-terraform-exporter-sap-btp-christian-lechner-lgzif/
Terraform Provider for Cloud Foundry 1.1.0 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/terraform-provider-cloud-foundry-v110-whats-new-debaditya-ray-xyxyc/

Report from SAP Insider EMEA 2024

SAP Insider EMEA 2024 event https://reg.eventmobi.com/emea-2024
UKISUG Connect 2024 event https://www.ukisugconnect.co.uk/
SAUG-x event https://www.saug.com.au/WhatsOn/SAUG-x2024

Report from ASUG Tech Connect

https://www.asug.com/events/asug-tech-connect-2024

CHAPTER TITLES

0:00 Intro

00:07 Report from ASUG Tech Connect

02:47 Report from SAP Insider EMEA 2024

04:10 Developing Event-Driven Integrations with SAP BTP 📖

05:04 Terraform Provider Updates

Transcription

[Intro] This is the SAP Developer News for November 14th, 2024.

[Devtoberfest Winners] Hi, I'm Bato. I'm one of the Devtoberfest winners of last year. I'm here at the ASUG and enjoying a conference, doing hands-on labs, doing interesting sessions from SAP and some partners and enjoying the time. Hi, my name is Sebastian. I'm coming from Germany and I'm one of the Devtoberfest winner from 2023. It's my pleasure to be here. It's very nice TechEd conference and I love it to contact a lot of other people and to have fun. My name is Daniel also winner of this year's Devtoberfest. I'm very excited to be here. We learned a lot of new things and I'm also very excited for the disney film tomorrow. Hello, my name is Jarosław Piotrko, I won the Devtoberfest 2023. I would like to greet all programmers from Poland and encourage you to participate in Devtoberfest, because you always have a chance to win and participate in such a fantastic event, and in the journey to the Wolt Adysteia Park. Thank you. Hello, I am Abul Eshtam, the winner of Devtoberfest 2023. Here I am at SAP TechConnect attending this session on AI and different solutions of SAP and about knowing about SAP Joule. A big thanks to SAP Developer Advocate for this opportunity. Thank you. Hi, I am Sandra, I am from Mexico, and I am a winner of Devtoberfest 2023. So, hi developers, I am here in Teques, finally I met the developer advocates and I have learned a lot on the hands-on sessions. See you! Hola, yo soy Sandra de Mexico y soy una de las ganadoras del Devtoberfest 2023. Hi Bablock, I'm finally in SAP TechEd and I met the developers advocates and I've also learned a lot about hands-on. I'll tell you later. See you!

[DJ] Good morning, I'm here in Copenhagen, day three, the morning of day three, the last day of the SAP Insider EMEA 2024 event. As you can see, there's a little bit of a great time happening right now. I'm here in the LEGO area, what's not to like, but basically, it's been a great event. This is one of a number of events that's been happening post SAP TechEd Virtual 2024. We've had three days, well, two and a half days so far, all fantastic conversation, face-to-face conversation, talking about tech, getting to know each other, and also learning from each other in various sessions, lectures, but also hands-on sessions, two-hour hands-on sessions that have been very successful and very well received. We've also had a developer garage staffed by the developer advocates just down there. But anyway, it's been a great event. Look out for more events coming your way. There's one in Birmingham in the UK in early December as part of the UKISUG Connect and also one in Australia coming up next week, I think. Anyway, it's me, DJ, signing off for now from SAP Insider EMEA 2024. Cool.

[Antonio] Hola, SAP developers. Are you interested in learning about event-driven integrations? Well, I've got some news to share with you. Check out the new SAP Press eByte Developing Event-Driven Integrations with SAP BTP. It was released this week. Event-driven integrations are all about systems communicating in real time, reacting to changes instantly, and creating seamless experience for our customers. In the invite, I dive deep into how you can leverage SAP BTP to build event-driven integrations with the different offerings available. There is also an accompanying GitHub repo with code samples and integration artifacts to help you get started. It is a great time to explore how event-driven architectures can transform your integration strategy. I'm including the links in the description. Enjoy.

[DJ] In the infrastructures code arena, Terraform is where it's at and the Terraform Provider for SAP BTP released last year is already a really successful piece of software. This week a new part of the Terraform Provider for SAP BTP was released, the Terraform Exporter for SAP BTP. Now this is a result of lots of customer feedback, the number one wish is to of course be able to start with existing resources on SAP BTP and bring them into the Terraform home. This is a beta release of the Terraform exporter for SAP BTP, there's plenty of information about it from Christian's blog post, the documentation on the GitHub repo and there's also a video. So why not give it a try and let the team know what you think, they're eager to find out. And talking of Terraform, the latest release of the newly written Cloud Foundry provider, the Terraform provider for Cloud Foundry is out 1.1.0. This release brings lots of new features and improvements, so check out the blog post and give that a try as well. Just if you're wondering, just as the BTP CLI is for managing resources on SAP BTP on the command line, and the CF CLI is for managing resources in Cloud Foundry specifically on the command line, so is the Terraform provider for SAP PTP and the Terraform provider for Cloud Foundry. They sort of parallel each other. Anyway, give it a go, and again, let the team know what you think.

SAP Developer News, November 21st 2024

2024-11-22T11:43:06.294000+01:00

Podcast Version: SAP Developer News November 21st, 2024 - SAP Developers

DESCRIPTION

SAP BTP ABAP Environment - Release 2411

Blog Post: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/sap-btp-abap-environment-release-2411/ba-p/13940790

SAP TechEd On Tour from SAUG-x

Event Page: https://www.sap.com/australia/events/2024-11-19-au-pe-regional-conference-teched-on-tour-saugx.html

SAP BTP Innobytes October 2024 edition

Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xZCTtSGP_0

SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 08 and SAP Analytics Cloud 2024/Q4

SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 08 Released: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/sap-hana-2-0-sps-08-released-safeguarding-customer-investments-and/ba-p/13942543
What’s New in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 08 sessions: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/what-s-new-in-sap-hana-2-0-sps-08/ba-p/13941640
Calculation View Features of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS08: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/calculation-view-features-of-sap-hana-2-0-sps08/ba-p/13927860
What's New Viewer - SAP Analytics Cloud: https://help.sap.com/whats-new/42e4f84a0e5e458792b1047eaf81c31a?locale=en-US
SAP Analytics Cloud: Q4 2024 Release's Features with Experts & Demos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atNQxqkf0Z8&list=PL3ZRUb1AKkpTv44lv8pQvdlwT_MzAi3Qq&ab_channel=SAP

SAP Open Source Webinar on the OpenSearch Foundation

Details and sign-up https://events.sap.com/opensearch-foundation/en/registration.aspx

SAP Berlin Event

Info and to register: https://events.sap.com/eur/sapbuild-and-agilita-workshop/en/home

CHAPTER TITLES

0:00 Intro

0:07 SAP TechEd On Tour from SAUG-x

1:04 SAP BTP ABAP Environment - Release 2411

2:07 SAP BTP Innobytes October 2024 edition

3:19 SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 08 and SAP Analytics Cloud 2024/Q4

5:02 SAP Berlin Event

6:16 SAP Open Source Webinar on the OpenSearch Foundation

Transcription

[Intro] This is the SAP Developer News for November 21st, 2024.

[Josh and Michelle] Hey everybody, this is Josh and Michelle, and we are live from Melbourne, Australia here at the SAUGx event part of the TechEd on tour. I had a great time being here not only taking part in keynote we are standing in the Developer Garage which you may recognize from other TechEd events. We did this in Florida at ASUG, we are doing here at SAUGx and I believe there's two more events coming up right Michelle? Yes, we have one in UKI and one in Germany a little bit later next year. The DSAG event is like in April, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So, we're on tour. We're coming after you guys. We hope that you enjoy meeting with us, the developer advocates in person. Lots of great things to cover from what was announced at TechEd, as well as lots of great tutorials you can complete for some great little prizes that we have here in the Developer Garage. Oh, absolutely. And they've been flying off as soon as people have been finishing so many tutorial tracks to get them all. Alright, so that's it from Australia. We'll see you guys later.

[Rich Heilman] Hey folks, Rich Heilman here coming to you live from SAUGx in Melbourne, Australia. I wanted to take a quick minute and let you know about the new release of SAP BTP ABAP environment 2411 and of course the new blog post from Nora Klemp of ABAP product management. Nora gives us all the details about the new features coming in release 2411 including items like, you can now use Multidimensional Analysis App Generator, Wizard, to create all ABAP development objects that are needed to build, expose, and deploy a Multidimensional Analysis Fiori application. So that's cool right? We're also getting some enhancements to BRF Plus and the XCO libraries, a ton of enhancements around business events, and much much more. For more information on the BTP ABAP environment released 24-11, check out Noor's blog post today. See you later. I'm gonna go jump on a plane. Bye for now, friends.

[DJ] Just in case you missed it, the October 2024 edition of SAP BTP InnoBytes is out. And it's all out AI and also Terraform. So on the AI front, there's a new SAP Business AI feature catalog on the SAP Discovery Center. And alongside the feature catalog, there's also a feature estimator with which you can work out costs and savings. And there's also a new generative AI based content generation assistant on the SAP Automation Pilot platform. And for setup of mission-related infrastructure on BTP, you can now use Terraform, which in contrast to the original booster-based setup mechanisms, allows you to download the Terraform scripts to use. And also, of course, that means you can adopt them and extend them for use in your own landscapes and environments. Open and free. Infrastructure as code. What's not to like? more about all these new features in this October 2024's edition of the SAP BTP InnoBytes video. Link in the description.

[Witalij] SAP HANA database powers over 70,000 customers worldwide, supporting some of the most critical applications and workloads. With the general availability of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS08 as of November 20, we at SAP are delivering key updates to enhance scalability, reliability, and developer experience while reducing the total cost of ownership. This release is designed to protect customer investments in our leading multi-model translitical database platform. Starting Friday, November 22, tune into SAP Developer's channel for our What's New in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 08 series, hosted by truly yours, Developer Advocates. Over seven sessions, you'll hear from more than a dozen experts from the SAP HANA product management team. Each session will be packed with insights into the latest features and updates, along with guidance to help you make the most of them. Check out the full schedule in the blog post linked below. Don't miss out and join us. The QRC 2024 release of SAP Analytics Cloud went GA this week as well. You can explore the full list of all new features and enhancements in the What's New viewer on the SAP help portal. The SAP Analytics Cloud team has already released a video showcasing all the significant updates, complete with demos presented by product experts. Discover the highlights of the Q4 2024 release including bulk migration from classic stories to optimized experience, analytics catalog and grouping assets, story extensibility enhancements and so much more. Check it out today and start using these new features in in your tenant now.

[Daniel] I remember being invited to the first SAP Build Berlin event. It was called something like Burgers Beyond Budgets or something like that. Anyway, it was a great event. I got to talk a little bit. Everybody did the hands-on. And now there's a second event. Not that I was invited to it, but it's still going to be a great event. And it's combined with a Christmas market. So, there will be discussions about SAP Build, then a hands-on exercise, which I think I know what it's going to be. And I think so therefore it'll be very good. And then you'll go to a different place, and you'll have a Christmas market. The only thing I know about the Christmas market is that there will be glue wine, if I said that correctly. Not that I'm a big fan. The first time I had it was exactly 20 years ago. I was in Heidelberg where it was freezing cold, and they gave you glue wine. and the only good thing about it was that it was hot. Any event, I would go to this event in Berlin, even if you're far away, I would make your business to come November 28th. Speakers, hands-on, Christmas markets. Be a great time. Hope to see you there.

[DJ] There's a public webinar in early December, open to all and organized by the SAP Open-Source Program Office. It's on the open search foundation, how and why it was formed and why open search and open-source enterprise grade search and observability suite was moved into that foundation plus lots more from two great speakers. The webinar is on Thursday, the 5th of December. Follow the link in the description to find out more and how to sign up. See you there.

“ABAP AI is our Shared Treasure” - ABAP AI is on its way.

2024-11-25T08:44:38.882000+01:00

It’s time to talk about the announced ABAP AI capabilities, planned to be delivered with the 2502 release and beyond. ABAP AI is important to all SAP business software developers. It is our shared treasure that we hold in our hands. Let’s take a moment to elaborate a little while on this statement.

ABAP AI is powerful

The new Joule copilot integrated into ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse, offers a full-fledged copilot experience and by that revolutionizes the way ABAP developers work. It provides AI support during the development process, significantly accelerating the creation and testing of custom ABAP applications. These groundbreaking developments have already been revealed and demonstrated at SAP TechEd 2024.

Imagine someone sitting next to you and guiding you, to write very good ABAP code. Not too bad, you might say. Now imagine that person complementing you and even starting to write code or to do unit tests for you. You can even discuss with this person and have them explain code you don’t understand.

Let's take a closer look at some of Joule's ABAP developer capabilities.

Joule for ABAP Code Prediction (Ghost Texting)

This feature helps you code. As you start typing your code, Ghost Text uses AI to propose the next lines of code. The difference between classic code completion already available in der development tools and this new feature is that ABAP AI actually understands the context and makes intelligent suggestions that are aligned with your coding objective. This is made possible by GenAI and SAPs trained ABAP model, which is designed to understand and predict ABAP coding patterns. This allows you to spend even more time solving complex problems and innovating.

ABAP AI Unit Agent

The ABAP AI Unit Agent is designed to assist you generate unit tests for an ABAP class. This ensures that your code is thoroughly tested. Traditionally, you would have to write unit tests manually, which is time-consuming and likely to be error-prone. With the ABAP AI Unit Agent, you can automate this process: You run the unit test for the ABAP class and check the code coverage option. The ABAP Unit Test analyzes the code coverage and identifies the methods that are not adequately covered. The ABAP AI Unit Agent adds to this the generation of unit tests.

ABAP and Core Data Services Code Explain

This feature makes ABAP, including ABAP Core Data Services (CDS), easier for developers to understand. When you select an ABAP class, CDS view, function module, a method or a code snippet, ABAP & CDS Explain analyzes the code and generates a human-readable explanation. This explanation includes a high-level overview of what the code does, as well as detailed explanations of each component. It is designed to understand ABAP coding patterns and conventions, so that it can provide accurate and useful explanations. By providing clear explanations of complex function modules, it helps developers improve their understanding of ABAP coding patterns, and best practices.

ABAP AI is attractive
SAPs ABAP AI SDK, powered by Intelligent Scenario Lifecycle Management (ISLM ), serves as an "AI toolbox" for ABAP developers. It allows you to incorporate AI capabilities to your custom ABAP applications. The ABAP AI SDK integrates seamlessly with the SAP BTP GenAI Hub, enabling you to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) and infuse AI capabilities into your custom applications. This SDK is also used internally for all ABAP-based AI solutions.

With the ABAP AI SDK, you can easily access and use the models and features provided by the Hub by calling released ABAP classes and interfaces directly in your application code. The ABAP AI SDK takes care of the rest, executing prompts and handling the complexities of integrating AI capabilities into ABAP. This seamless integration significantly simplifies the process of incorporating AI into business applications. If that is not attractive, what is?

ABAP AI is a treasure

Even more powerful than the ABAP AI developer use cases mentioned above is the ABAP custom code migration use case. Our shared goal is to help our customers and partners to transform their custom code and move into SAP’s cloud universe.

ABAP AI for Custom Code Migration will be a game changer in achieving this goal.

We will help you transform your custom code by accelerating the transformation of custom code. Whether it's the mandatory transformation of ABAP code when migrating from ECC to SAP S/4HANA or the subsequent transformation of ABAP code to ABAP Cloud and a Clean Core.

ABAP AI support is provided for the migration of from the classic business suite to SAP S/4HANA and to ABAP Cloud and a Clean Core. This will include explanations of the mandatory simplification items to be considered during your SAP S/4HANA transformation, as well as code suggestions for refactoring your classic ABAP code towards ABAP Cloud. The corresponding AI features will be integrated in the Custom Code Migration App as well as in ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse.

Let us summarize: ABAP AI is powerful. ABAP AI is attractive. ABAP AI is a treasure.

Have a look at the ABAP AI roadmap for more information:
https://help.sap.com/docs/abap-cross-product/roadmap-info/genai

SAP Teched Melbourne 2024

2024-12-16T09:32:34.338000+01:00

On 19th and 20th of November 2024 was the Australian SAP User Group (SAUG) conference in Melbourne. This year it was called SAUGX as it incorporated “SAP TECHED on Tour” the first time SAP TECHED has been held in Australia since circa 2024. I will try not to include any references to dustbins or food reviews in this blog.

Image Deleted due to instructions from SAP. You are not allowed to use the word SAP in images on an SAP website.

All the pictures bar one in this blog are generated by an AI, except one by a human, a cartoon that implies only AI systems can create pictures these days, and I credit the human artist in that case.

How this is going to work is I made a bunch of notes during each presentation. Here I will regurgitate those notes, plus add any random comments/opinions that pop into my head and wander off down rabbit holes. The end result will be about 95% my random thoughts, and 5% of what the speakers said. Thus, any correct facts come from the speakers, any strange opinions come from me. If a speaker did express a strange or controversial opinion, I will mention that explicitly otherwise assume any nonsense comes from me.

Think of it a like a Donal Trump speech where he has a script that focuses solely on economic policy, but 95% of the time he ignores the prepared script and talks about how good his teeth are, and that mars and the moon are the same object, and how the USA won the war of independence in 1783 by taking over all the airports so the UK could not any more planes full of troops.

Day One 19/11/2024

Keynotes

Welcome to Country

The conference kicked off with an aboriginal elder lady giving a talk. This sort of thing never used to happen, but now it is pretty much compulsory, which is a positive thing. My wife is aboriginal BTW.

SAP ANZ CEO – Angela Colantuono

She mentioned that 84% of the world’s commerce touches an SAP system at some point on its journey from supplier to consumer. That’s sounds right to me, but the funny thing is I still have to explain what the company SAP does to people at parties. SAP has been described as “the biggest company no-one has ever heard of” and that is bang on right. In the USA I think SAP advertises on TV, but it certainly does not in Australia. It does put up adverts in airports, so teenagers about to fly out to Bali can look blankly at the advert.

She repeated the claim made by Christian Klein at SAPPHIRE earlier this year; namely that by 31/12/2024 on average, 80% of transactions in the various SAP system worldwide will not be made using TCODES and the like, but rather by talking to the AI assistant “Joule” and telling it what you want to do.

This time last year the very mention of a product like Joule (AI assistants / generative AI / anything like that) would have had me vomiting into a bucket, but I have moderated my position somewhat in the last 12 months. Nonetheless, 31/12/2024 is only three weeks away at time of writing, so I cannot help but think this is an ambitious goal. Now, I am not looking over the shoulder of every single SAP user in the world simultaneously, so I do not know what percentage used Joule instead of TCODES yesterday, but I wonder. Especially given so many companies are still on ECC 6.0

That last fact ties into another comment she made “You don’t want to be giving customers a stone age ERP system, that would be like giving them an IPHONE7”. I had to look it up and found that the latest model was an IPHONE16 which is obviously a much higher number than seven.

However, to a caveman like me, if someone showed me an IPHONE7 and it could:-

Make phone calls.
Send text messages.
Take pictures.
Have an internet connection.
Fire death rays (be honest that is what people wish smart phones could do, and many PRETEND they can).

Then I would wonder what else you need. People might add “emails” but to me that was the very worst thing about getting a smartphone from work, because it is physically impossible for me to not look at them, and the ratio of people sending me jokes to people wanting me to do something is about 1 joke per ten difficult requests. Some of the requests could be described as jokes as well, but the person sending them does not think so.

Silly Panel

Silly panel. Silly, silly panel. They have to sandwich this in between other keynotes, to prevent the audience trying to escape. The panel thing works quite well on talk shows where the line-up is say King Charles, Celine Dion, Tom Cruise and Weird Al Yankovic, and the previous guests stay on the sofa whilst the new one gets asked questions, but the whole thing is more interactive with the various guests interrupting each other, arguing, throwing custard pies at each other, and the whole thing ending up in a fist fight. Just like the houses of parliament really. Anyway, the whole concept just does not work in an IT conference setting.

Peter Plium from SAP – RISE with SAP

My organisation has some sort of worldwide RISE with SAP contract, our S/4HANA migration team even has someone from SAP on the org chart with “RISE” in their title. So, the whole concept is a bit more than theoretical to me. It does not help that there is a Cockney expression “Don’t take the rise” which means “Don’t make fun of me” as in “Poor Willy Thorne, his hairs all gone, and his mates all take the rise!”.

It was claimed 33% of the worlds’ GDP goes through companies which have signed up to RISE.

They say that honesty is the best policy. It transpired Peter had flown to Australia all the way from London and with stop-offs and transfers it took him 40 hours in total, most of which was in the air. That can easily happen if you take an indirect route. My route was once Tel Aviv => Copenhagen => London => Bangkok => Sydney and that took about 40 hours, if you include time waiting around in airports. What he maybe should not have mentioned was a comment along the lines of “We all know buying SAP software costs a lot of money! What does SAP do with that money? Well, I’ll tell you; those 40 hours in the air were not on economy class!”. That was meant to be humorous, and did indeed get a laugh, and I love business class myself, but I would have maybe glossed over that bit when giving a speech.

Moving on to case studies, the oil giant Exxon just finished a RISE with SAP transformation onto S/4HANA. Apparently, they started off with 3,500 SAP systems worldwide and ended up with just four at the end. And all the Z code in that myriad of systems, which had been built up over the years, it turned out only 10% of that code was being used productively.

The next point was very interesting. You are no doubt familiar with SAP constantly pushing back the date when ECC 6.0 will go out of support. Currently it is 2027 for normal support, 2030 for extended support. Due to the fact this date has been moved in the past, many customers just assume that come 2027 it will be moved again to 2035 or some such, and this will keep happening forever. As might be imagined companies with that belief are not too fussed about migrating to S/4HANA anytime soon.

Peter said that even if SAP desperately wanted to extend the cut-off date they could not, and thus the current cut-off dates will never be extended. The stated reason is that ECC 6.0 itself relies on some non-SAP components which SAP has licensed and that license runs out in 2030. My experience in life has been that the stranger something sounds, the more likely it is to be true, so this internal component excuse sounds plausible to me.

He then said – and I have heard something like this before – that there is zero value at all in a purely technical migration. The analogy he used was moving house and not only taking every single thing in the house with you, even things you had never used for twenty years, but also taking the dustbins full of rubbish from the old house and installing them in the new house, still full of rubbish.

Even in the “old” days of traditional upgrades I used to describe a technical migration as moving from a bungalow to a fully furnished three story house, with a pool room and a gym on the second floe, and a swimming pool on the third floor, and then never going upstairs even once. That sounds silly, but so many companies do just that. They only do the upgrade to avoid increased maintenance fees, and then spend a fortune building an extension on the ground floor containing a pool room and a gym and spend another fortune digging a swimming pool in the garden.

Going back to case studies, Microsoft runs SAP, and the two companies often blow each other’s trumpets live on stage during each other’s flagship conferences. In this case Microsoft did a “RISE with SAP” transformation and claim they changed things so much they reduced DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) by an average of two days, thus saving oodles of money. I may have written this down wrong but Microsoft called this the “Purple People Eater Program” which is the best project name I have ever heard of. They ended up with a “clean core” which was defined as only having one hundred and fifteen enhancements.

Hands-On Session – Joule AI RAP Object Generation

One aspect of this conference which made it just like TECHED was that on the first day there was a non-stop stream of hands-on sessions, with room for loads of people in each. They were even run by the same people you would expect at a “real” TECHED, like Thomas Jung and Rich Heillman.

I picked the “RAP Object Generator” session. To be honest I was expecting the “RAP Generator” as invented by SAP employee Andre Fishcer some years back, as that works very well indeed, and I have even written about it in my book. The whole idea is that a RAP object contains lots of moving parts all of which have to be created individually and instead what you want is to use text to describe the general nature of the application you want, press a “Big Red Button” and then all the boiler plate objects are generated automatically, and you can then concentrate on coding the complex (fun) bits, the business logic for derivations and validations and actions and the like.

I had expected to see the exact same thing again, rebranded with the name “Joule” bolted on the top, in the same way a few years back SAP took several utterly disparate products and changed all the names, so they all had “Build” in the name. Years before that SAP took about ten products and added the name HANA to them all, even if there was no database involved at all.

However, this was not the old RAP generator I knew and loved. You may have heard of the “not invented here” syndrome. That is, if the RAP Generator was an open-source community project invented by Mr. Blogs who runs the cheese shop in John O’Groats, then it is clearly not an official SAP project, so SAP might well build their own version. In this case the original project was 100% internal to SAP but it was not invented by someone in the correct team and so the product had to be totally rebuilt from scratch. I don’t think the end result is as good as the old one (yet) and so I dubbed it the “Poor Man’s RAP Generator”. And of course, the old one was free to use, and I bet SAP will charge for the new one.

<RAP GENERATOR PICTURE> This image was generated by AI, SAP insists I say this, even though it is patently obvious.

Lion Brewery – Pub Crawl App – Supreeth Shambu / Jerry Wong

There was a big contest run by SAUG where companies were invited to build an app based on SAP BTP using as many different technologies as they could think of, preferably stuffed with AI. This is known as a “Hackathon”.

The finalists demonstrated at the SAIG annual summit in Sydney in August 2024. The audience voted and my a very large margin the winner was Lion Brewery with their pub crawl app. As I write this I am drinking a “Stone and Wood” which is one of their beers. Every time I drink one a ticket with my name is put into a barrel to win a Jet Ski. I am not 100% positive I actually want one, which is why I will probably win it.

In this session they did a deep dive into the code. I have to be honest – very little of that code was ABAP so I did not really understand too much, but I got the general idea. It seemed all you had to do was add into the code a phrase like “word all your responses as if you were an Ocker Australian” and suddenly the AI starts all it’s responses with “G’Day Mate!”.

The AI was called Joey which makes a lot of sense in Australia, as that is a pun on the name used for baby Kangaroos. It would not work so well in the UK where the name “Joey” often has negative connotations due to a disastrous mistake made by children’s TV program “Blue Peter” in 1981.

I mentioned earlier that not as many people had migrated to S/4HANA as SAP would like, and that might limit the adoption of cutting-edge technologies, that are only available on S/4HANA Public Cloud, for example.

This presentation got a bit more specific. They claimed that in the nine years since S/4HANA came out (2015-2024) to date only 30% of customers have finished migrating from ECC 6.0 to S/4HANA. No split was given but I am willing to bet that of that 30% not as many chose the Public Cloud option as SAP would have desired. The specific figures were 8,200 out of 35,000 customers are finished with the migration to S/4 and if they can get that accurate the data must be coming from somewhere.

They also agreed that 2027 was an immutable deadline. As I said, I am inclined to believe this.

Me! Me! Me! – Monstrous Experiments with AI in ABAP

I never thought I would end up giving a speech about AI, but this turned out to be the most successful speech I have ever given, both in terms of the number of people in the audience, and the number of people coming up to me afterwards or the next day or so to ask me things. As a rule of thumb if no-one asks you anything, they either do not care about the subject and/or have not listened to a word you have said. The trick is to do something unusual right at the start to wake your audience up. In August I used break dancing, this time I claimed AI stood for “Artificial Insemination” complete with a picture of a cow. What I would have loved to say (but did not) was how you say “Artificial Intelligence” in German. Look it up – you will find the answer most surprising if English if your first language, though the Germans must wonder what in the world it is we are laughing at.

In any event. I was inspired by a blog by Enno Wulff, where he got ChatGPT to analyse a badly written ABAP program and got it to make suggestions to improve it. So, I picked a badly written program I had written in 2001 and got Microsoft CoPilot to try and do the same. I could not use ChatGPT as that would put my company’s “Z” code in the public domain, and that is a no-no, but with Microsoft CoPilot it stays private. Pity really, as just before I started my experiments a new beta version of ChatGPT called “Gemini” came out which is supposed to be a quantum leap forward.

I proposed five experiments and created the outline of the presentation without even running the experiments. It was a no-lose exercise as the experiments would pass or fail, and either way I would have something to talk about.

There were several experiments, all designed to mimic the steps a human programmer would do, when taking a very old, badly written program, for which the business need still exists and there is no standard SAP equivalent and dragging that old Z program into the modern world, kicking and screaming.

Given the source code, explain to me what the program does.
Now you know what the program does, generate a whole bunch of automated ABAP Unit Tests to prove it does what it is supposed to do.
Now we a safety net of tests, what is the best way to refactor the program for robustness and performance and readability etc. etc.
Given we are moving from ECC 6.0 to S/4HANA soon, what changes does the program need so it will still run in the new environment?
If one day this program had to be installed in “ABAP in the Cloud” what changes would be needed?

As can be seen, each test was more difficult than the last. To be brutally honest I was expecting total failure on every single one. Let us see what happened.

Explanation - The AI provided a very good summary of what the report did. Though I think it was cheating by reading the comments in the code. It also knew what the ABAP list viewer was. So, this is a green tick. Further experiments would be taking all the comments out first to see if it could still explain the program, and an even better test would be putting in false comments. In real life programs tend to end up with false comments over time as programmers change the code but not the comments.

Unit Tests – The AI suggested a whole bunch of unit tests when asked and gave me the code AND said the database tables should be mocked. And when I said to show me how to do that, it did, using the CL_ABAP_TESTDOUBLE and the unit test complete code. Big green tick there. NB this is intended for existing old programs. For any new programs I would use TDD and the tests would need to be created first. I wonder if CoPilot could handle that? That is an experiment for another day.

Refactoring - The AI came back with a big list of suggested improvements in under a second, I read through them and could not argue with most of them. It got really hung up about naming things properly, which is fine by me, the proper of use of constants etc. It did not like the INNER JOIN in my program suggesting using a FOR ALL ENTRIES which is the opposite of what I would do. But by and large, the result was good. Another green tick.

S/4HANA – The results the AI came back with were a lot more generic, as might be imagined, just parroting back recommendations it found on the web. However, it did try and adapt some of those recommendations using code from the program at hand and saying how to change it. As an example, it said change the SELECT * which for a column based database would be good advice, had there been any SELECT * statements, which there were not. I will give that one a “neutral”.

ABAP in the Cloud – The AI did a lot better than I would expect, and again tried to give examples from the program at hand. But it did not mention anything about the user interface, and some suggestions were just plain wrong e.g. it thought you could still do direct reads on tables like LIKP and have PERFORM statements. The ideal result would not only be specific recommendations (with code) based on the program at hand and telling you to create some sort of Fiori app for the UI. And if it could give code samples for that as well, that would be nothing short of a miracle. But it doesn’t do any of that as yet, so a big red cross.

In conclusion, I describe Microsoft CoPilot as fit for purpose to help you with your ABAP code. Plus, this tool will only get better as time goes by, due to the intense level of competition in this area, and the vast amount of resources the tech giants are throwing at this area.

<MONSTER PILOT ROBOT CO-PILOT PICTURE> This image was generated by AI. SAP insists I say this, even though it is patently obvious.

MG Motors India – Sudhir Kataria

The auto industry in India is intensely competitive, as might be imagined. The MG Motors company is trying to solve the problem via high technology, both behind the scenes (hence speaking at an SAP event about all the tools they were using) but also at the customer end. A running slogan throughout this conference “turn features into experience” that is, no point having lots of fancy high-tech gadgets in the car unless they make driving the thing more enjoyable.

My company did the exact same thing circa 2000 – there was nothing to tell us apart from our two competitors, so we bounced a million miles ahead by going bonkers with SAP and other technology and more importantly that made life a lot easier for our customers.

Going back to MG Motors the speaker noted they were up to 41% of all employees being women.

He then used the phrase “Headless CRM” which I have never heard of, so I looked it up. As far as I can see, that is the MVC pattern, with a clear separation of the UI layer from the logic and database. So, nothing new there.

Dr. Nicholas Nicoloudis – PWC – 007 and the Gen AI Agents

This was the chap who borrowed my hat at the last conference to help with his Indiana Jones impersonation. This time, he wanted to dress as James Bond, but it turns out the world has gone so crazy it is almost impossible to buy a realistic looking toy gun, let alone get up on stage with one.

Regardless the nature of the pun is clear. James Bond is a Secret Agent, and various forms of AI also use “Agents”. In the song “As Tears Go By” the lyrics are “Doing things I used to do, they think are new”. In this case I reminded of a thesis one of my mates wrote in his final year of university (1990). He was doing computer science, and his thesis was all about the use of agents in computer software. The biggest TV show at the time was “Twin Peaks” so he kept mixing up the software agents with Special Agent Cooper.

Anyway, what was presented was that there are three levels to AI “agents” and currently worldwide the focus is mostly on the first level.

Level One – personal assistants, like CoPilot and the one SAP is working on (Joule).

Level Two – Agents in Workflow i.e. involved in one or more steps of a business process.

Level Three – An interconnected web of agents, talking to each other from across different business process.

Level Four – Gary Gygax gives you an extra ten-sided dice to give you more hit points, and a +6 when you attack “giant class creatures” like Orcs.

Level Forty Two - All the dreams that we were building / We never fulfilled them / Could be better, should be better / For lessons in love

Then there was a demo – and I have seen this several times now – where you start off in TEAMS and ask CoPilot a question and it passes that question on to Joule who interrogates the SAP ERP system and sends back the answer and CoPilot adds the report (or whatever) as a new tab in the TEAMS chat / meeting / whatever.

It ended with a wonderful cartoon which describes everything you need to know about how robots and humans behave at the moment.

It’s like the Novel 1984 where all the novels and songs were written by machines.

Evening Event

Normally you have a one hour “cocktail” event (where no cocktail has ever been served ever) in the exhibition hall at the end of the first day. For this event, they upped the ante, and there was an event offsite which lasted a lot longer than usual. You also had the option to attend a separate “hackathon” event to watch and/or participate in an AI fueled coding experiment – with beer and pizzas – and that ended before the main event, so some people ended up going to both.

One good thing about these events was that at no point did an SAP board member touch a woman’s rear, causing the SAP executive to have to resign the next day.

Image Deleted due to instructions from SAP. You are not allowed to use the word SAP in images on an SAP website.

Day 2 – 20/11/2024

Keynotes

From Features to Feelings – Florian Heretsch

When I write a review of a conference you will have noticed I keep waffling on about Toastmasters – that is, it does not matter how good the technical content of your speech is, unless it is presented in an entertaining manner the audience are going to fall asleep or play with their phones or stare into space having elaborate fantasies in their minds.

In this case the speech was very well structured indeed. It followed the rule of three where you have one main point for the whole presentation, and split that into three related points, and each of those three gets split into three related points, and so on, and each point follows logically on from the last, what they call a “seamless transition”.

In this case it went like this – he was in Melbourne for the first time and was cycling around => he discovered Melbourne has the “Marvel Stadium” => he likes Marvel Films => Iron Man has a “digital assistant” => So does SAP.

The next leap was to try and link this to “product success” which is a bit tenuous, but a link nonetheless, much better than having no link whatsoever and going off at a tangent for no apparent reason, which I am sorry to say some presentations do, and this very blog does.

It is always interesting to get an insight into what goes on “under the hood” when SAP are building new software, be it in the ERP system or any of what I still think of as “peripheral” systems like Ariba and Concur. The same rules apply to all, and there a large amount of such rules. As an example, there are 14 different UX consistency requirements that must be met.

As an aside, I will give you an example where this sort of thing does not happen. I was using some software, not going to say what it was, and I got a response and wanted to cut and paste that response into a spreadsheet. I highlighted all the text, pressed CONTROL+C, and then in the spreadsheet pressed CONTROL+V and got the prior entry on the clipboard, not what I had just highlighted. It took me ages to work out that instead of CONTROL+C I had to highlight the text, right click and take the “copy” option. Then CONTROL+V would work. What is wrong with CONTROL+C may I ask? Why invent a different way to copy things?

I knew that S/4HANA Public Cloud did not have an IMG, but you cannot have an SAP system without some sort of customizing (and by customizing, I mean configuration I mean the settings you make in the IMG, many people say Z code is customizing but it is not).

I had never seen the “new” IMG in action till now. Instead of the big IMG tree you type in text saying what settings you want to make, and then in the background all the “T” configuration database fields are filled with whatever you just asked for. Some consultants are going to be gutted about this, they spent years mastering all the oddities of the IMG, like illogical tree structures, which kept changing every release, related nodes being nowhere near each other in the structure sometimes and so on. All that fun has gone now.

In November 2024 SAP planned to release “Joule for Mobile” whereby you can talk to your AI assistant via your smartphone as in “Hey Joule, tell me the names of all the staff that report to me”. That sounds like a silly example, and it is, as obviously you would know, and if you did not maybe that does not make you an optimal manager, but I have seen that exact example given several times in previous conferences and online demonstrations.

You can also talk to your watch, or even your smart glasses. Well, you could talk to them before I suppose, but now you will get a reaction.

I was reading about a gentleman in the USA who had been wrongly imprisoned for murder, and after 30 years DNA testing exonerated him, and he was released. When he was released, he walked down the street expecting things to be quite different from 30 years previously. What he was not expecting was that everyone was talking to themselves, and he wondered if everyone in the world had gone mad. Maybe they have, but in this case, I expect most of them were talking to someone via their smartphone using those things you stick in your ears. As a bonus it has taken away the stigma that people with hearing aids used to feel, as now everyone has something that looks like a hearing aid on their ears.

When people used to talk to themselves, often they were not talking to themselves as such, they were talking to imaginary people only they could see and hear. Does an AI count as an imaginary person?

Developer Advocates – Bluebeard, Rich Heilman etc.

This was the team that had travelled from the USA to Australia to promote all things ABAP, run the hands-on session etc.

Demos were given of the new RAP Generator, and unit test generation and so on.

It was stressed that all the new AI stuff for ABAP was only going to be available in ADT (ABAP in Eclipse) and not in SE80. Maybe this will be the straw that breaks the camels back and finally starts developers using Eclipse for ABAP. I suppose it all depends on how much SAP are going to be charging for the new AI tools.

That might stop people using VS Code for an IDE as well – at the moment the bonus VS Code has, apart from looking better (which is subjective) is that you can use it for UI5 development and ABAP development all in the same tool, like you used to be able to do in Eclipse. Up until now, anything good in the BAS or ADT has managed to be replicated in VS Code, often using the exact same plug-ins. I imagine SAP will want to make sure the Joule things only work in ADT and not VS Code, but there are going to be some very clever people out there trying to circumvent this.

It was stressed that unlike ChatGPT your data is secure when you use Joule. It is the same for Microsoft CoPilot, these things work within your firewall, and do not spew all your trade secrets out all over the internet.

A new word was invented as well “Agentic” which presumably means “the sort of software which uses agents”.

One thing I found interesting is that there is a class (or set of classes) whereby from your ABAP program you can programmatically make calls to the “AI Core” without having to pop up a box for the end user to manually type in a query. I am not sure what the use case for this is yet, but my gut feeling is that this is a Good Thing.

Huge Trek through the Exhibition Centre

There are two important points to make about the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Firstly, it is enormous. The ones I went to in Las Vegas and New Orleans were pretty big, but this one could give them a run for their money, Unfortunately the second point is that the Melbourne Centre is not very well signposted, that is navigating from room A to room B is often not as easy as you would hope. This seems to be an Australian thing; many pubs and venues have an aversion to putting signs up saying where the toilets are. In one such venue I asked the barman “Where is your big sign saying where the toilets are?”. He then told me where the toilets were, but I replied, “That is not what I asked”. In the “Ruse Bar” in Parramatta they do not even have the word “toilet” on the door leading to the area where the toilets are. Instead, the door is white and blank, and is disguised as a fire escape.

In any event, I get the feeling the Melbourne Centre (hereafter) MEACC, is always fully booked out, there certainly seemed to be about ten conferences going on at once, and the SAP one was probably the smallest. I am guessing the waiting list might be a year or something, and the fact that “SAP TECHED on Tour” was happening was only 100% confirmed about six months before the event. This means that on the first day all the events were located in the same area of the MEACC, just a few minutes’ walk from A to B each time.

On the second day however, half the events were in rooms at one end of this enormous centre, and the other half at the other end. Some helpful SAUG staff guided a large crowd of us all the way through the centre until we found where we were going, which we would never have found otherwise. When we got there, we were told to go up to the fourth floor in the lift and I looked at the crowd and thought this is going to take very many lift trips, so I said “I do not mind walking up four flights of stairs, after all I have just walked a very long way already, where is the staircase? There wasn’t one. The lift was the only way in. I presume there was a fire escape (a real one, not a hidden toilet) but you could not walk up that.

<MAP OF HUGE TREK THROUGH EXHIBITION CENTRE> This image was generated by AI. SAP insists I say this, even though it is patently obvious.

Cloud ERP – Johnathon Rhodes

Back in 2018 I recall SAP had quite a strange definition of what “Cloud ERP” meant, I cannot recall what that was, but I never understood it. Now the definition has changed, and it means S/4HANA in the cloud, be in Public or Private.

It is always important to have definitions, especially if you know for a fact the SAP customers are getting confused. In this case:-

GROW WITH SAP => This is all about new customers, going live on S/4HANA Public Cloud.

RISE WITH SAP => This is all about existing customers, who have 20 years or more of Z code, migrating to S/4HANA Private Cloud.

SHRINK WITH SAP => This is where all the years of having to work with SAP software has driven you insane, and SAP allocates a psychiatrist to you to attempt the hopeless task of bringing you back to your senses.

The presentation I was at was all about the S/4HANA Public Cloud. I had not been to any such presentations before, because my organisation is on the RISE WITH SAP thing. But even if this presentation was academic for me, it was still very interesting.

As we know in the Public Cloud there is no SAP GUI, and as previously mentioned no SPRO transaction, and no IMG. The idea is that you can go-live in 18 weeks, as opposed to 18 months plus for a “normal” SAP implementation.

Again, we saw a live SAP report magically appearing in a TEAMS tab after having CoPilot request such a thing.

I had not seen anyone demonstrating transactions and reports in the S/4HANA public Cloud edition before. It looks nothing at all like traditional SAP GUI transactions/reports, a lot more colourful for example! The funny thing is that “under the hood” the vast bulk of database tables and standard ABAP code are exactly the same as before.

I am now going to go off on a tangent and stop speaking about anything said in the precise presentation at hand. As you may be aware, initially SAP thought that what people wanted was four releases a year, and all the new features got installed whether you wanted them or not. That is certainly how Ariba used to work, and I think Success Factors was the same. I think S/4HANA Public Cloud started off with four releases a year as well. The logic was “Do not worry, nothing can possibly go wrong, because there is no Z code”. The unspoken assumption was that all Z code was rubbish, very flaky, and all standard SAP code was always perfect, even new code written the day before by an intern on their first day of the job.

That is a bit of an exaggeration, the truth is somewhere in the middle, but the point is when you put new code into production, standard SAP or Z, there is always the potential for something to break. So, you would be crazy if you did not do thorough regression testing each time.

This led to the situation where – with a quarterly release – a lot of companies spent twelve months a year testing non-stop. All this history is my take on things, rather than anything the speaker said.

What the speaker did say is that the current situation is that S/4HANA Public Cloud has two releases each year rather than four – in February and August – and any new features have to be explicitly activated.

I am going to go off on a tangent again and get all philosophical and pose a question I do not know the answer to. If we go back to about the year 2000 every time you did an SAP upgrade (every five years or so) you would get all the new features automatically. Then with 4.7 there came the idea of splitting the ABAP and APPL into two so you could upgrade one without the other. That never worked – at all. The next attempt was when we got to ECC 6.0. Then you had “enhancement packs” filled with new business functions, all dormant.

This is where the question arrives – during the upgrade you have to test everything anyway. If you were to switch on every single business function you might possibly need in the future does that increase the testing effort? The problem with keeping them all dormant is (a) many companies never switch anything on ever thus making the upgrade a bit pointless and (b) if you switch on a function as and when needed (which is the whole idea) then it has been seen that switching on something in one area like plant maintenance can have unexpected side effects in FI/CO/MM and even SD. So, you have to test the whole system again, just like you did during the upgrade, just to be safe. This could lead to the situation where if you switch on one function each year, it is just as much effort as having an upgrade every year.

Am I exaggerating? Probably. But there is no smoke without fire. I only know when I switched on a business function in my company – something to do with goods receipts – it affected areas I would never have expected, and the thing did not work anyway, and we did not notice until it was too late, and once active in a real development system you cannot back it out, because it creates new database tables and the like, and it took five years of OSS notes until it finally worked. This was the problem whereby if you did a GR for a PO with multiple cost centre assignment the P&L posting was not done until invoice receipt, which was just wrong, wrong, wrong, and a business function was released to address this, but the intern who wrote the code had mixed up WERKS with BUKRS and used them interchangeably with horrific results. Probably because in the IDES system those two fields always have the same value (1000).

SAP BTP Extensions – Jorg Thuijlis / Katan Patel

I was having a beer with these gentlemen the night before, and they went to my session, so it would be a bit rude if I did not go to theirs’ in return. For full disclosure, I have never used BTP in real-life, only for writing books and blogs and things. Nonetheless I 100% acknowledge this is the future of SAP. One of the best presentations I have seen about BTP was in New Orleans and was about how BTP was used to super-charge the SAP system used in the Navajo Nation in the USA. It was not easy, but it was worth it, was the impression I got.

Wandering off down a rabbit hole again, the general theme again and again, regardless of whether it is SAP, or an SAP customer, or the Cybermen, or Miss Bloggs from the bus stop who has never even heard of SAP, is why would you pay ten billion million dollars for an “upgrade” and get nothing out of it? None of that rambling has got anything to do with this presentation.

This presentation was actually about how to move CDS Views and Fiori apps out of ECC 6.0 systems into the BTP system. Where I work, we are on ECC 6.0 and do not have any CDS Views as yet, nor any Fiori apps, but probably many ECC 6.0 companies do. I hope they do, after all SAP has been pushing this for years, as have I in my books.

Anyway, the basic premise of this presentation was to store what I would call “Z” data in a different place than where the standard SAP data is stored. I have heard this concept many times before, in a “classic” SAP ERP system your Z tables live in the same database as the standard SAP tables, now a separation is desired. That makes doing joins and things a bit difficult I would have thought, and you would get a performance hit, but I am sure there is always a way around this.

Clean Core ALM – Sruthi

I was facilitating this session, and the next one, which just means reading out the name and biography of the speaker, and what the session is about, which the audience knows already, else they would not be there. More difficult is getting the speaker to stop on time, to make way for the next one. I had no issues with that in this conference, I did not have to “gong” anyone or drag them off stage with a shepherd’s crook.

I was looking at my notes about this session, and most of them make no sense at all after the event. I can only presume I was distracted by my “duties” light though they were.

I had written down “In the past where you presented any sort of problem to SAP, the suggestion you got back was to do an upgrade”. That is true enough, and I am not sure anything has changed, except maybe upgrades are “easier” now if you have the mythical “clean core”.

The product known as “Solution Manager” has reached end of life, I am not sure anyone is going to miss it very much. The replacement is “Cloud ALM” which is also bundled in with your normal SAP ERP subscription. This product is bound to be better because it has the word “Cloud” in its name. It also supports RISE WITH SAP.

Just as a general observation of mine, I see a lot of UI5 applications at these conferences. Not always, but a lot of the time, most of the screen is comprised of white space, with little islands of information hiding in the centre. That must mean a lot of extra scrolling as compared to the “horrible” SAP GUI that we have been complaining about for the last 30 years.

The SAP ALM system seems to include dashboards which include “Peer” statistics. Unless I am missing something obvious this seems designed to scare the living daylights out of you by implying all your competitors are miles ahead of you. What you do about this, if you believe it, I am not so sure.

Cloud Extensibility in S/4 - Mani PS

I was facilitating this one as well. I have been giving talks for many years now, and I know it is very disheartening when there is 30 seconds to go and there are only three people in the room. The speaker, me to introduce the speaker, and one audience member.

The temptation is to hold off the start of your speech in the hope more people come into the room. However, the idea is to start exactly on time regardless, otherwise you over-run, and the speaker after you has to start late, and the audience will be late going to the next sessions, which makes those speakers think no-one is going to turn up, and so it rolls, getting worse as the day goes on.

Thus, I forced the speaker to start exactly on time. I was very optimistic that more people would turn up in the following fifteen minutes, and they did, maybe not as many as he would have liked, but far better than there only being one person in the audience.

Getting to the subject of the presentation – I never seem to talk much about such things, as you must of noticed by now – the rule is if the data is loosely coupled (all Z data) then you use BTP to extend, if the data is tightly coupled (using standard SAP objects like sales orders or PM notifications or some such) then you use on-stack extensibility. Many speakers I have seen at these events have only ever used the on-stack extensibility thus far, as usually you always have some sort of interaction with standard SAP business objects.

If I (not the speaker) had to do a one-line summary of the whole thing you can extend the S/4HANA Public Cloud as much as you want, originally that was not the idea, but everyone wanted it, so now you can, but you cannot really re-use your 20 years of existing Z code without re-writing 99% of it.

Going off on yet another tangent, from the year dot SAP have been saying “let the end users create code” and there have been half a million tools created to do this, often using pseudo-code like FI/CO substitution, HR fake code, Variant Configuration fake code, and so on, all down the decades. In the end the real IT department has to come in and rescue the mess that gets created. It ends up being ten times more effort than if you had made the real IT department make the change in the first place.

Nobody ever learns from history so “key user extensibility” is a big part of S/4HANA public cloud. SAP claims the end users will be creating custom business objects and custom CDS views (!) in no time. I wonder.

As an example, the idea was that when RPA was a big thing a year or so ago (No-one ever talks about RPA now) once again the idea was that business users would be creating these workflows. Before I knew it those end users had discovered the RPA workflow could call function modules and the like – not methods, function modules – to fill in the gaps, and before you knew it the real IT department was heavily involved once again.

What has changed this time? And is this a “game changer”. Cynical though I am, maybe this time the goal will be realised. The difference being, the end users are now supposed to ask “Joule’ to create the extensions for them, by describing what they want in natural language. At the very minimum you would think that Joule would not be struggling with the syntax when writing code for you.

I would like to end on a surreal note. One of the people who came into the room after the talk had started was Jocelyn Dart, on the very reasonable grounds she would be giving the very next speech, in the very same room, after the current speaker had finished. As I said that it is why it is important for speakers to start bang on time, so they can finish bang on time.

Traditionally the Q&A section occurs right at the end of the session, when I am giving a talk I encourage people to ask questions to me one-on-one after the presentation ends, as often questions are only of interest to the person asking that question, and the rest of the audience gets bored and starts walking out. Just to re-iterate, I encourage questions after the event, when I gave a talk in New Orleans in 2023 I was still getting questions two days later, at the closing event in the “House of Blues” which is fine.

In this case there was time for Q&A at the end, so people did start asking questions, and the speaker was answering, and Jocelyn decided to answer some of those questions as well, and then she started answering questions about what she was speaking about next. Just to be clear she was having the Q&A session for her presentation before she had even started. I had never seen that before.

Second Evening Event

This was called an SAP “Stammtisch” (German for Regulars Table). I used to go to the one in Frankfurt, and there is one in Sydney every month or so. So, it was not an official part of the event, and you had to buy your own food and drink (not the end of the world). However, all the developer advocates were there (the ones from SAP USA) and they started early in case people had to catch a flight home that evening. That was a very sensible idea, up till now the argument against holding an event on the last day evening was that people had to catch planes. The solution was so simple.

It was held in a pub called “The Old Bank” in Melbourne, which of course was a bank a hundred or so years ago. A very nice venue, maybe a little bit too far away from the exhibition centre (I would have picked the German Beer Hall opposite the exhibition centre, what with SAP being a German company) but that is not the end of the world either, and opposite that pub was an underground pub called “the Sherlock Holmes” which was also wonderful. If you like UK beer which not everyone does.

Image Deleted due to instructions from SAP. You are not allowed to use the word SAP in images on an SAP website.

Conclusion

It is a wonderful thing that SAP TECHED was in multiple countries throughout the world this year. For a while it looked like there was going to be only one in-person event per year, alternating between the USA, India, and Europe. At that point I would have said the chances of Australia ever getting a look-in were zero.

Luckily, as there was no USA TECHED in 2023, the American SAP User Group ASUG stepped into the void with TECHCONNECT in New Orleans, and, dare I say it, that was probably better than your traditional TECHED, and before you knew it plans for the real TECHED were back on again, more events than ever before each year, but with the various SAP user groups co-hosting the events. I have no idea if there will be another one in Australia next year, but I hope so!

Cheersy Cheers

Paul

TechEd Japan クロージングセッションについて / Event Review: TechEd Japan Closing Session

2024-12-25T00:30:00.031000+01:00

イベント後記

TechEd Japan クロージングセッションについて

TechEd Japanのクロージングセッションを任せて頂いて、4年目になりました。正確に云うとその内の1回は、コロナが前日の夜に判明し、流れてしまったので、ご提供できたのは3回なんですが…。（その節は登壇オファーを受けていただいた方、イベント関係者の皆様には多大なご迷惑をおかけいたしました🙇。）

今日はそんな3回のセッションのテーマを振り返りつつ、このクロージングに込めてるメッセージや今回の最新のクロージングセッションでみんなから受け取ったコメントを整理してご紹介したいと思います。

元々、TechEd Japanのクロージングセッションは、この辺の業界の著名人に登壇してもらう的なコンテンツをご提供するのが私の受け取る前からの雰囲気でした。ここで受け継いだ私もまずはそのスタイルから入らなくてはいけないのかと思いそのスタイルを踏襲しました。途中から私のコンセプトも企画・提供のスタイルも変わっていくのですが…。

それが、「著名人登用で注目集める期」です。最初の1年目は実は2本の企画を担当させていただいておりました。なのでDay1のクロージングセッションで、TechEd Japan Specialというコーナーで、その当時にSAPが力を入れ始めていたサステナ系をテーマに選び、直近で読んだ本の著者の方へオファーして、講演＋SAPのその辺のサステナ系をやっていたメンバーとのパネルと云う形で「テクノロジーが切り開くSDG’s・ESGビジネス～サステナビリティがこれからのプロジェクトのキーワード」というキャッチでセッションをご提供しました。

そして自分の色を出した「SAPタレントプロデュース期」を同時にスタートします。

一本目は先人に倣ってやりましたが、どうも自分の想いや仕事にしていることをもっとここに注入したい！

なので、もっとSAPコミュニティの人たちにスポットライトを当てていくように進めました。ここが各年を通じて私が考えている根っこになります。

これまでSAPや私たちを信じで一緒にやってきてくれた人たちにスポットライトを当てたい！できれば一緒に成功したい (^^)！

そんな思いが詰まったコンテンツが、以下になります。

2021年：TechEd Japan生討論「SAPプロジェクトにチャレンジは不要なのか？攻めと守りのジレンマを議論」（この時は企画・シナリオ・演出に集中し、司会は別のメンバーにやってもらいました。司会と出演者のダイバーシティ意識しました。)

2022年/2023年：SAP BTPトーク～クラウドシフトの重要なキーワードはコミュニティ～（ここから私も出演して司会もするようになります。ここでも出演者はダイバーシティ意識しました。決して出たがり屋さんな訳ではないので、くれぐれも誤解の無きよう。）

２年あるのは、2022年にこの企画で実施する予定だったんですが、冒頭に述べた通り、コロナを前日のリハーサル後に発症し、お蔵入りになってしまったため、翌年に同じテーマでリベンジしたという経緯があるからです。

2024年：「クロージングセッション：SAPユーザとパートナーが語る、クリーンコアの今と未来」というタイトルで、前半のユーザーさんパート、そして後半のパートナーさんパートの２部構成で、その後半パートを担当させていただきました。テクノロジーの祭典の割にちょっとふわっとしたテーマや内容だと感じた方もいたようですが、関係ありません！Clean Coreがイベントテーマの今年に、私たちがここを話さなくてどうする?! っていう思いと、やっている人は当たり前って思ってることが、マーケットで共有理解・共通の目線・共通の実行を促すために大切なメッセージだったと思っていますし、やはりやって良かったと思ってます。

そして、今年は視聴者参加型にしたいと思い、セッションのプレゼン画面にMentiを埋め込んで、実験的に開催させていただきました。時間の都合や画面投影サイズの都合などでいただいたコメントの内容を取り上げるまでできなかったことは反省でしたが、今後に繋げられる仕掛けができたかなーと思っています。

最後に、どんなコメントをもらえたのかをちょっとまとめてみましたので、ご紹介できればと思います。

クリーンコアの推進

クリーンコアの推進に関しては、多くの参加者がその重要性を認識している一方で、実践の難しさを感じているコメントが多く見られました。

前向きコメント:

クリーンコアが実現されることで保守コストが下がり、導入が目的でなく手段として十二分に活用されることを期待している。
クリーンコアの推進にあたり、他社が一番苦労している部分についてもっと聞きたい。
クリーンなビジネスデータが集まり活用できる場所。
順序を間違えないことが大事。

お悩みコメント:

クリーンコアの考え方は理解できるが、実践が難しいと感じている。
コアの近くにいる人ほど受け入れるのに苦労するのではないかと感じている。
標準化が難しいプロセスや領域についての合意形成が難しい。
クリーンコアの推進に向けたユーザーさん側の理解・合意が必要。

BTPの活用

BTPの活用に関しては、その有効性や具体的な使い方についての意見が多く寄せられました。

前向きコメント:

Jouleを試してみたい。
有効性のある機能に当てはまることが大事。
アドオン=BTPではない。
順序を間違えないことが大事。

お悩みコメント:

BTPの中で何がプロジェクトでぶっちゃけ使えるのか知りたい。
BTPじゃないといけない使い方を知りたい。
BTP上のSideBySideアプリの運用は難しいと感じている。

AIの活用

AIの活用に関しては、期待もありつつ、まだ未知なるものへの不安が交錯する意見が多く見られました。

前向きコメント:

AIに期待大！
AIでアドオンがまとめられるということ。
開発の目的や概念が変わっていきそう。

お悩みコメント:

AIを基幹データに対して使うのは、セキュリティ面で不安が多い。
バージョンアップでの現実としてのテストはどうなるのか。
簡単に開発、ってどれくらい簡単なのか知りたい。

結論

TechEd Japan 2024で寄せられた多くの意見は、今後の技術導入やプロジェクト推進において非常に貴重なものだと感じています。

これは一つのきっかけですが、こんな皆が考えていることを言い合える、共有し学び合える場がこれからも作っていけるといいなと改めて感じました。

次はSAP Inside Track Tokyoですよ！

Event Review: TechEd Japan Closing Session

It has been four years since I was entrusted with the closing session of TechEd Japan. To be precise, one of those years was canceled due to a COVID-19 diagnosis the night before, so I have actually only been able to deliver three sessions. (I deeply apologize to those who were scheduled to speak and to all event staff for the inconvenience caused 🙇.)

Today, I would like to reflect on the themes of these three sessions, share the messages embedded in these closing sessions, and organize the comments received from everyone during the latest closing session.

Originally, the closing session of TechEd Japan was designed to feature prominent figures in the industry. When I took over, I initially followed this style. However, over time, my concept and the style of planning and delivering the sessions evolved.

This period can be described as the "Attracting Attention with Prominent Figures Phase." In the first year, I was responsible for two projects. For the Day 1 closing session, under the "TechEd Japan Special" segment, I chose sustainability as the theme, which SAP had recently started to emphasize. I invited the author of a book I had recently read to give a lecture and held a panel discussion with SAP members involved in sustainability. The session was titled "Technology Unlocking SDGs and ESG Business – Sustainability as the Key to Future Projects."

Simultaneously, I started the "SAP Talent Production Phase," where I wanted to inject more of my thoughts and work into the sessions. I aimed to spotlight people in the SAP community. This has been the core of my thinking throughout the years. I wanted to highlight those who have believed in SAP and worked with us, and ideally, succeed together (^^)!

Here are the contents of the sessions filled with these thoughts:

2021: TechEd Japan Live Discussion "Is Challenge Unnecessary for SAP Projects? Discussing the Dilemma of Offense and Defense" (I focused on planning, scripting, and directing, while another member hosted. We were conscious of diversity in the host and participants.)
2022/2023: SAP BTP Talk – The Key to Cloud Shift is Community (I started hosting from here. We were conscious of diversity in the participants. I am not a spotlight seeker, so please do not misunderstand.)
- The reason for two years is that the 2022 session was canceled due to COVID-19, as mentioned earlier. We revisited the same theme in 2023.
2024: "Closing Session: SAP Users and Partners Discuss the Present and Future of Clean Core" – I was responsible for the second part of this two-part session. Some felt the theme and content were a bit vague for a technology event, but it was essential to discuss Clean Core, the event's theme. It was a crucial message to promote shared understanding and common execution in the market, and I am glad we did it.

This year, I wanted to make it interactive, so we embedded Menti in the presentation screen for an experimental session. Although we couldn't address all the comments due to time and screen size constraints, I believe we created a mechanism that can be built upon in the future.

Finally, I would like to summarize and share some of the comments we received.

Promoting Clean Core

Many participants recognized the importance of promoting Clean Core, but there were also many comments about the challenges of implementation.

Positive Comments:

Lower maintenance costs and full utilization as a means rather than an end.
Interest in hearing more about the challenges other companies face in promoting Clean Core.
A place where clean business data can be gathered and utilized.
Importance of not making mistakes in the order of implementation.

Concerns:

Understanding the concept of Clean Core but finding it challenging to implement.
Difficulty in gaining acceptance from those close to the core.
Challenges in forming consensus on standardizing processes and areas.
Need for user understanding and agreement in promoting Clean Core.

Utilizing BTP

There were many opinions on the effectiveness and specific use cases of BTP.

Positive Comments:

Interest in trying Joule.
Importance of applying effective functions.
Add-ons do not equal BTP.
Importance of not making mistakes in the order of implementation.

Concerns:

Wanting to know what can be practically used in projects within BTP.
Wanting to know why BTP is necessary.
Finding the operation of SideBySide apps on BTP challenging.

Utilizing AI

There were mixed feelings of expectation and uncertainty about AI.

Positive Comments:

High expectations for AI!
AI can consolidate add-ons.
The purpose and concept of development seem to be changing.

Concerns:

Security concerns about using AI with core data.
Uncertainty about testing during version upgrades.
Wanting to know how easy development is.

Conclusion

The many opinions gathered at TechEd Japan 2024 are invaluable for future technology adoption and project promotion. This is just a starting point, but I hope we can continue to create spaces where everyone can share and learn from each other's thoughts.

Next up is SAP Inside Track Tokyo!

TechEdの10年

2024-12-26T09:50:51.952000+01:00

はじめに

2024年10月、今年もTechEdが開催され参加しました。
初めて参加した2014年のTechEdから10年強が経ちますが、ふと「当時のTechEdはどうだったか？現在のTechEdではそれらがどうなっているか？」ということが気になり始めたので、昔と今を緩く並べながら、自由気ままに、年の瀬らしく、振り返ってみることにしました。その内容をブログに書き起こすという何の芸も飾りもありませんが、最後まで御目通し頂けますと幸いです。

（この記事は SAP Advent Calendar 2024 の12月11日分の記事として執筆しています。）

TechEdの名称

2014年

2024年

SAP TechEd && d-code

SAP TechEd Virtual

（＋ SAP TechEd On Tour）

2014年のTechEdは、その名称に尾ひれが付いていました。実はこの年、TechEdの名称を今後はd-codeに変えるというアナウンスがありました。より開発者に焦点を当てていくという趣旨だったと思います。その後いろいろな議論があったのだと推察しますが、翌年から結局は元のTechEdで開催されて今も続いています。名称が ”SAP TechEd” でなかったのはこの年の特徴だったように思います。

一方の2024年のTechEdも特徴的で、Virtual（オンライン）とOn Tour（オンサイト＠各Region）の2種類の形式での開催となり、開催時期も別々に分けられたため両方にリアルタイムで参加ができるスタイルとなりました。On Tourには参加できませんでしたが、コミュニティの皆様のF/Bを拝見/拝聴しますと、各Regionならではの良さが感じられとても興味深い内容でした。

開催日数

2014年	2024年
5日間	2日間

2014年は5日間でした。1日目の夜にビジネスKeynoteがあり、2日目の朝にテクノロジーKeynoteがあったので、行動スケジュールも今とは少し違っていました。2020年に初めてオンライン形式での開催となって以降、開催日数は縮小されて元の規模には戻ってきておらず、これは近年のオンサイト形式での開催でも同様です。日数が少ない状況下でオンサイト参加する場合は、現地でしかできない行動も加わり参加セッション数が必然的に少なくなるため、帰国後にオンラインの録画で不足を補完したりもします。これも昔にはない、個人的にカスタマイズした新しい参加スタイルになっています。

セッショントラックの種類

2014年

2024年

9個

Cloud Integration, Orchestration, and Intelligent Processes [INT]
Data Management and Modeling [DMM]
Development and Extension Platform for SAP HANA and Cloud [DEV]
Enterprise Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Planning [EA]
IT and Cloud Management [ITM]
Mobile Solution Development [MOB]
Secure Development and Configuration [SEC]
Technology, Strategy and Innovations [TEC]
User Experience and User Interface Development [UXP]

6個

Digital Transformation with Cloud ERP [DT]
Application Development and Automation [AD]
Artificial Intelligence [AI]
Data and Analytics [DA]
Integration [IN]
SAP Business Technology Platform [XP]

2014年はトラックの種類が多く、個々のトラック名称も長く、覚えるのに苦労しました。後程触れますが、この年は今までのABAPだけでなく、Cloudや技術のOpen化を目指し始めた年でもあったため、トラックの統一感はまだありませんでした。今はBTPやCloud ERPという基軸がありメッセージも分かりやすく収れんされているため、トラック名からおおよそのセッション内容が想像しやすくなりました。当時は興味があるセッションを探すのが大変でした。

セッション数

2014年	2024年
770+	100+

2014年の9つのトラックで、最もセッション数が多かったのがデータマネジメント [DMM] でした。そのトラックだけで約200のセッションが用意された背景には、当時のIoTとBig Dataブームがあったと思います。近年のようなオンライン開催になると、毎回セッション数は大幅に削減されています。

参加場所

2014年

2024年

イメージです

これはもういいですかね、2014年当時の自分は、まさか家からTechEdなんて思いもしてなかったはずです。オンライン参加で欠けがちな熱量やモチベーションを高めるため、2024年のKeynoteは、音響のよい特殊な施設（セルフKeynote会場）に皆で集まりました。映画館感覚で大型スクリーンに画面投影してリアルタイム視聴し、その直後に意見交換を行うような工夫も取入れたりしました。

キーノートのテーマ

2014年	2024年
”Making it real”	”Where ideas get real”

あれ、あまり変わっていない？時が経っても変わらないrealへの挑戦。

発表されたテクノロジー

2014年

2024年

2014年は、まだS/4HANAが世に出ておらず、インメモリデータベースとしてのHANAが物事の中心でした。「HANA SPS09を発表します！」と出た瞬間に会場が大フィーバーだったのを覚えています。ちなみに当時のHANAのDBサイズは512GBが主流だったので時代を感じます。一方、Cloudシフトが謳われ始めたのもこの頃からでした。SAP初のPaaSであるHCP（HANA Cloud Platform）が発表され、技術のOpen化がここから始まったように思います。当時は何がなんだかわからなかったのですが、これがのちのSCP、BTPへと脈々と受け継がれていきます。

おわりに

TechEdは時代に合わせた変化を遂げながらも、多くの事柄を提供してくれる大切なイベントであることに変わりはないということを、振り返りを通して改めて確認することができました。書き終えた時点で思ったことは、「向こう10年はどうなっていくのかな？」ということでした。その頃のテーマは何なのか、その時にTechEdはまだ存在しているのか。なんらかの形でそこに関わっていたいなと想う、2024年の暮れでした。

「TechEdの10年」。最後までお読み頂き、ありがとうございました。

Converting IDoc to a Fixed-Length Flat File Using XSLT Mapping in SAP CPI

2025-02-28T10:15:50.114000+01:00

Step-by-Step Process

1. Receiving IDoc via IDoc Sender Adapter

The first step is to receive the IDoc in SAP CPI using the IDoc Sender Adapter.

🔹 Key Configuration Steps:

Use the IDoc Sender Adapter to connect SAP CPI with SAP S/4HANA or ECC.
Ensure the correct IDoc type (e.g., DELVRY03, ORDERS05) is selected.
Establish connectivity using the appropriate authentication method.

2. Mapping IDoc Data to a Fixed-Length Structure

Before applying XSLT, ensure the IDoc fields are mapped correctly to match the flat file format.

🔹 Important Considerations for Fixed-Length Files:

Each field in the flat file must have a specific length (e.g., 10, 20, 30 characters).
Truncate or pad fields with spaces if they do not meet the required length.
Ensure the sequence of fields is aligned with the file structure.

3. Applying XSLT Mapping for Fixed-Length Output

To ensure the flat file follows a fixed-length format, we use XSLT mapping. The following XSLT code helps achieve this by:
✔ Removing XML tags while preserving field values.
✔ Padding fields with spaces to match the required length.
✔ Adding new lines to ensure proper record structure.

XSLT Code for Fixed-Length Formatting

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="text" indent="no"/>

  <!-- Remove XML tags and keep only text content -->
  <xsl:template match="*">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="node()"/>
  </xsl:template>

  <!-- Preserve text nodes -->
  <xsl:template match="text()">
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
  </xsl:template>

  <!-- Add line breaks after each segment -->
  <xsl:template match="Header | SubHeader | HeaderText | LineData | LineText">
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
    <xsl:text>&#xA;</xsl:text>  <!-- New line character -->
  </xsl:template>

  <!-- Root template -->
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

🔹 How XSLT Helps:
✔ Removes XML tags while preserving text content.
✔ Adds line breaks to format the flat file correctly.
✔ Ensures proper structuring for downstream processing.

4. Sending the Flat File to an SFTP Server

After the transformation, the flat file needs to be sent to an SFTP server.

🔹 Configuring the SFTP Receiver Adapter:

Set up an SFTP Receiver Adapter in SAP CPI.
Provide the correct host, port, and authentication details.
Define the file naming convention to store the output properly.

Conclusion

By leveraging SAP CPI, we can efficiently convert IDocs into flat file formats using XSLT mapping and an SFTP adapter. This approach eliminates manual intervention and ensures seamless data transmission between systems.

💡 Key Takeaways:
✅ IDoc Sender Adapter captures IDocs from SAP S/4HANA or ECC.
✅ Message Mapping helps format data as per flat file structure.
✅ XSLT Mapping removes XML tags and applies necessary formatting.
✅ SFTP Adapter delivers the final flat file to the target system.

With this approach, businesses can streamline IDoc-to-flat file conversions and enhance their integration capabilities within SAP CPI.

SAP Community - SAP TechEd

SAP Developer News: TechEd Day 2

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SAP Teched ---- I was worried this year... On-Premise - Favorite Session

Come Say Hi at an SAP TechEd Tour Stop

Top 10 takeaways #SAPTeched 2024

SAP TechEd 2024 Announcements - Consolidated and Simplified

First let's have a quick summary of all the key announcements.

SAP Build + ABAP Cloud

SAP Build for S/4HANA Extension Development

New Generative AI Capabilities of SAP Build with Joule

Joule with SAP Build Work Zone

Joule with Collaborative AI Agents

Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition

Joule in SAP BTP

Joule in Other SAP Solutions

Joule studio in SAP Build

SAP Knowledge Graph

SAP HANA Cloud Knowledge Graph Engine

SAP Expands Strategic AI Partnerships

Generative AI Hub + ABAP

Generative AI Hub – New LLMs Support

Generative AI Hub – New Data Centers

Generative AI Hub – Other Updates

SAP Expands its Portfolio of Learning and Certification Offerings

SAP Datasphere

New embedded data lake capabilities

SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP Integration Suite

SAP TechEd 2024 - Recordings and News

List of GitHub Repositories for SAP TechEd Hands-on Sessions

SAP TechEd 2024: The Future of Intelligent Enterprises Unveiled

Driving ABAP Innovation: Key highlights and future trends from SAP TechEd 2024

SAP Developer News, October 24th, 2024

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TechEd On Tour in our very own Melbourne

SAP Developer News, October 31st, 2024

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SAP Partner Headlines: The Latest News Delivered Straight to You

Discover TechEd “Live” at SAPinsider EMEA 2024

ASUG Tech Connect 2024 | Keynote Highlights & Resources

SAP Developer News, November 14th, 2024

DESCRIPTION

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SAP Developer News, November 21st 2024

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“ABAP AI is our Shared Treasure” - ABAP AI is on its way.

SAP Teched Melbourne 2024

TechEd Japan クロージングセッションについて / Event Review: TechEd Japan Closing Session

Event Review: TechEd Japan Closing Session

Promoting Clean Core

Utilizing BTP

Utilizing AI

Conclusion

TechEdの10年

はじめに

TechEdの名称

SAP TechEd && d-code

SAP TechEd Virtual

開催日数

5日間

2日間

セッショントラックの種類

9個

6個

Digital Transformation with Cloud ERP [DT]Application Development and Automation [AD]Artificial Intelligence [AI]Data and Analytics [DA]Integration [IN]SAP Business Technology Platform [XP]

セッション数

770+

100+

参加場所

Digital Transformation with Cloud ERP [DT]
Application Development and Automation [AD]
Artificial Intelligence [AI]
Data and Analytics [DA]
Integration [IN]
SAP Business Technology Platform [XP]

100+　