We attended both TechEd Las Vegas (Sept 25-29 2017) and Barcelona (Nov 14-16 2017) events. Here is the report from our colleagues
SAP TechEd: Star Trek and digital transformation.
At its two annual conventions (Las Vegas and Barcelona) dedicated to innovation, SAP is pushing its strategy a little more around data, cloud and developers. The goal: to impose its platform and expand its ecosystem to remain central to the business world at the time of digital transformation.
For about ten years now SAP has been trying to change its German austerity image for the trendier California image. A new step was taken at this year’s SAP TechEd with a convention that saw Björn Goerke (CTO Cloud Platform Division) and his team appear at the plenary convention disguised as characters from the Star Trek series.
In fact, SAP has not made any revolutionary announcements, but continues its mutation toward cloud, data management, and platform efficiency. On this long road, developers seem to be the essential lever for the success it wants to maintain, or even to grow, in the enterprise IT applications segment. Hence the goal of making their lives easier through a series of announcements aimed at bringing greater flexibility in multicloud environments and integration in potential data usage; and simplifying their work environment by providing more API and microservices-based tools and resources.
Data enhancement
On the data side, SAP introduced Data Hub in Europe after doing so a few weeks ago in the United States.
Data Hub has a much broader mission than Vora, which has been in SAP’s portfolio for two years, and which enables data stored in Hadoop, via Apache Spark. This time, it is about helping organizations manage complex data environments by building streams from a variety of sources. The multiplication of sources makes integration increasingly complicated.
With this comprehensive portfolio, SAP appeals not only to developers, but also to architects, data scientists and business analysts.
SAP Cloud platform expands to facilitate cloud migration, integration and microservices development
SAP Cloud Platform-which is 100 percent based on HANA-is gradually emerging as the backbone of SAP’s strategy, built around two pillars: the platform itself, which enables the integration or development of applications, and applications delivered as Software as a service and increasingly integrated: from S4/HANA to Success Factor via Ariba.
In terms of integration, SAP announces a stronger partnership with Google and claims its presence on the three main clouds: Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure, embracing innovative technologies such as Cloud Foundry and Open API Initiative.
In fact, more than a hundred microservices and APIs are now available, including Blockchain, IoT, Data Intelligence, Analytics, etc.
Facilitating the task of developers
For developers, SAP is announcing the porting of its ABAP development tools to the cloud (something that has the entire audience applauding in both Barcelona and Las Vegas).
In addition to ABAP, it is the set of development tools integrated into a single management console that also includes a 2.0 version of the iOS SDK to simplify iPhone app development and porting. The stakes are high for SAP. It’s about helping customers in their transformation, particularly through Leonardo, to be sure that an entire ecosystem will follow its strategy.
