Super-GAU - SAP Cloud Platform

The starting point for this column is a surprise visit from my department head for our Abap modifications, who also has to ensure "order" in the Z namespace.

A year ago, this deserving employee was filled with euphoria when he heard the announcement from SAP CTO and President SAP Cloud Platform that Abap was poised for a rebirth in the cloud.

SAP had seriously decided not only to further develop its own programming language, but also to install it as an essential element on the SAP Cloud Platform.

The anticipation was great, the disappointment even greater: Put simply, Abap on the SCP is a virtual machine where the Abap code is processed. It works, albeit with very modest performance.

The point, on the other hand, would be to integrate Abap into SCP like other languages and make it transparent and compatible with all services. The SCP virtual machine for Abap seems to me like the famous Trojan horse.

I can't say much more on this subject because it feels like the last time I saw an Abap code was 20 years ago. But I picked up the phone and tried to discuss the strategic direction of SCP with a few colleagues. In this context, I also learned that SAP CTO and President SAP Cloud Platform Björn Goerke is no longer with SAP.

He has left the company and is expected to join Google in the near future - but this also seems to me to put Bill McDermott's "cloud first" strategy at extreme risk. He will find a successor for Goerke, possibly at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, where his new Chief Technology Officer Jürgen Müller also comes from.

I was even more shocked by another piece of information: To create apps based on SAP Cloud Platform, you need a full, regular and therefore expensive SAP license. A fact that I had not thought about before - my fault! In our group, of course, there are enough developer licenses for all possible engines and platforms. I don't want to hear the accusation of underlicensing.

However, a comparison with the general IT developer community opened my eyes: Generally, full-featured developer licenses are given away for tiny amounts. Many AI services and databases are available free of charge from hyperscalers. Only after a certain data volume does the clock start ticking.

Thus, hundreds of IT companies on the ground and in the cloud provide computer science students, startups or freelance programmers with easy access to development environments.

SAP, on the other hand, is sustainably preventing innovation here, and the monetary value advantage is small: every SCP app that is successful on the market and is used by the existing customer could bring SAP a multiple of the one-time developer license in revenue. The existing customer has to license the entire system anyway in order to use the app. So why all the fuss about developer licenses?

Ultimately, it would be a topic for our DSAG, which has been very involved in education and training for some time. Here, an audition at SAP would really be in order, so that the development environment for the SCP is also released, similar to the free Hana licenses (Hana Express Edition).

In my opinion, SAP could only gain from such a step, because computer scientists and start-ups would then feel motivated to implement their ideas on the SCP as well.

After all, the SAP cloud strategy is not yet in the clear: Why should anyone rely on SCP at all? The hyperscalers like AWS, Google and Microsoft have fantastic offerings and are widely used. What are the advantages of the SAP Cloud Platform?

Ex-SAP CTO Björn Goerke explained this perfectly at TechEd Barcelona 2018: "You need the SCP if you develop apps very close to the SAP core. So: all programs that want and need to access SAP's core should ideally reside on the SCP. If SAP doesn't understand soon what the advantages and also alternatives are, there will be a SCP super-GAU soon.