In this podcast, learn how SAP pushes its message about building the intelligent enterprise, and find out why developers are not necessarily biting yet.
Conflict exists between what developers want from SAP now and how the vendor pitches its future plans for coders.
For example, a prominent message from SAP focuses on how developers can use the SAP intelligent enterprise. This approach will be built on open standards. "We strongly believe that openness is the future of enterprise software," Bernd Leukert, member of the SAP board for products and innovation, told attendees at the recent SAP TechEd 2018 conference.
However, few SAP organizations appear to have solid projects centered on the intelligent enterprise or migrations to the S/4HANA digital core. Instead, developers seem interested in simply learning more and determining what they need to do to eventually get such projects on their roadmaps.
Jim O'Donnell, news editor of SearchSAP, reported that he spoke with a number of SAP developers at SAP TechEd 2018 and none of them said they were involved in projects that drive the SAP intelligent enterprise like S/4HANA migrations. However, there is interest in such projects.
"None of them were involved in anything tangible or real [around SAP intelligent enterprise projects], but all were interested in it and they know it's there," O'Donnell said in a podcast. "A couple said [they were at TechEd] specifically to get information about where they can go, where the resources are, what they need to do to get this on their roadmap."
We strongly believe that openness is the future of enterprise software.
Bernd Leukertmember of the SAP board for products and innovation
The SAP intelligent enterprise will be cloud based and comprised of smaller, more flexible components. SAP described a "mix-and-match" environment where developers take only the parts that they need to build applications. The goal is also to open up legacy transactional data from back-end SAP systems and integrate it with other data sources and applications.
As the vendor described it, the SAP intelligent enterprise is built on three pillars: the intelligent suite, the digital platform and intelligent technologies. They are as follows:
The intelligent suite consists of the business applications like SAP S/4HANA, which forms the digital core, and SAP's new customer experience application, SAP C/4HANA.
The digital platform comprises SAP Cloud Platform and SAP Data Hub, a data management environment that integrates data from a variety of sources and makes it available for the applications.
Intelligent technologies -- including AI, machine learning, IoT, blockchain and advanced analytics in SAP Leonardo -- put the "intelligence" into the product.
Also in the podcast, learn what immediate challenges SAP TechEd 2018 attendees mentioned to O'Donnell.
