#32: SAP Messaging, ChatGPT, Acumatica Summit
Hi there,
Happy upcoming Valentine’s Day! May your Xs and Os be not just X- and O-data (what was that, by the way?) but tokens of appreciation from your customers and business users. Working with enterprise software can be a thankless job but we certainly appreciate your readership!
XOXO,
-Jelena and Paul
SAP: Read My Lips, No More Extensions
It’s been a while since SAP announced the 2027 deadline for end of mainstream support of ECC, its previous generation ERP. This deadline was previously extended from 2025 but in the Q4 2022 earning call SAP CEO reiterated that there will be no more extensions.
Of course, the deadline doesn’t mean that all ECC systems will stop working in 2027. There is still the extended maintenance option from SAP and third-party support from the likes of Rimini Street.
It would be great if SAP provided more compelling reasons for the ECC customers to move to S/4HANA than the inevitable deadline and “the faster horses” of HANA. But I’m rather glad SAP is holding the line on this because, folks, it’s just time to move on.
I’ve spent many years working with ECC, it can still be dependable and efficient, like an old Toyota Corolla. But at the same time, some things that are easy-peasy in S/4 (such as creating a basic OData service), require huge amounts of manual labor in ECC.
Then there is also a lot of moaning and groaning about the lack of skills. Well, the new generation of SAP developers is not going to learn BDC and SAPScript, my generation is close to retirement, and everyone in the middle wants to work with new technologies. Pretty soon old systems will be very expensive to maintain. For SAP customers this means: make a decision, make a plan, and make a move. JP
The SAP Pundit Playground Beatdown
You know how when you're a kid and some other kid bullies your sibling, and you jump in, fists flying, shouting "leave my brother alone!" - but then you go back home and harass your brother just as badly? (There's probably an amazing German word for that, like bruderschlappenfreude.) Or think about when you heard some teacher lavishing praise on your sibling and you thought "yeah, they're not so great behind closed doors!"
That exists in the SAP punditocracy. All the way from praising teachers to schoolyard bullies to reluctant sibling defenders. Here's a rundown of some of them.
Reluctant sibling defenders:
Tobias Hofmann. He's smart and works inside the SAP ecosystem, and one gets the sense he'd defend SAP against wrongful attackers. But he doesn't pull his punches in critique, and you can tell it comes from a place of love. (Or maybe tolerance.) This is one of my favorites.
e3zine. Deep inside the SAP world, but also unafraid to bare their teeth. Pieces like this from Peter Färbinger push hard for better things.
Schoolyard bullies:
BrightWork. I used to see them pop up on LinkedIn a lot with pretty fierce critiques of SAP. But I never saw any balance to the analysis…it was like it was grounded in negative bias.
The praising parents:
InsideSAP and SAPInsider. They have great words to say and a vested interest in your brother doing well. But they're a little blind to the golden child's rough edges.
Producing this list has actually made me appreciate brotherly tussles. The kind of kindred love that comes with a few scrapes and shouting matches. PM
Acumatica Summit: Community, Customers, and Lipstick
Since our first story about Acumatica, I’ve been casually observing what’s going on in their space. Acumatica’s annual summit, the SAP TechEd equivalent of sorts, was last week and here are my “keynote takeaways”.
Community was a big part of the keynote. “When you buy into Acumatica, it’s so much more than just a product”, said John Case, CEO. I liked his statement about the event too: “we’re here to listen and learn from each other” (emphasis mine).
Customer bill of rights update: “professional online training that is free and comprehensive.” (Watch my comments on this in our Nerdletter Talk.)
More about customers: “[…]what challenges they’re trying to overcome and what is the best technology to overcome those challenges” Yes! Tech to the business case vs. tech with no case.
The keynote was surprisingly enjoyable and just felt more… human. When CTO Mike Shchelkonogov stumbled for a second searching for the right word, I knew exactly how he felt. In Day 2 keynote, it was cool to see two women (Jenni Arrant from Jeffree Star Cosmetics and Debra Mignola from Acumatica) chat about lipstick and what it has to do with ERP.
And I guess the participants’ excitement was also because what they see on stage will be available to them soon (or already is?). No need to wait 2 years for a migration project. JP
[Editor’s note from Paul: don’t forget to catch our podcast episode with Dmitrii Naumov from Acumatica.]
ChatGPT Is Big Bucks
Yes, it's really big bucks. Rumor has it that Microsoft has put up a $10 billion investment in OpenAI - makers of ChatGPT, which has captured every single eyeball in the universe lately - in hopes of using its current and future AI breakthroughs in Microsoft's current and future product development. This wasn't their first go-round: in 2019 and 2021 Microsoft also invested.
If what Microsoft has gotten out of those previous investments is any indicator, this current cash tidal wave should lead to a tsunami of returns. They've already developed and launched a natural-language-to-code tool for Power Apps, a set of generative tools for Viva Sales, advanced enterprise-grade AI capabilities with Azure OpenAI Service, and the incredible GitHub Copilot for super-powered assistance in programming.
But with this latest investment and ChatGPT technology, they're really on the hunt. They're going after the grand prize of all money-printing-machines on the internet: search. As of Tuesday, February 7, Microsoft announced a new version of Bing and the Edge internet browser. Bing gets to have conversational and creative search that yields greater information capability than ever, and Edge gets a built-in chat feature that helps users summarize documents they're browsing and quickly provide writing assistance for web forms.
THIS IS COMPLETELY WILD. We're going to look back on 2023 as a watershed year for the current style of AI.
From an enterprise perspective, my eyes are often drawn to the inner workings of IT and app development. In this respect, Microsoft's innovations in both Power Platform and GitHub Copilot are far and away the most powerful tools I've ever seen. I am absolutely convinced that my job will look very different in a few years. And that means big bucks, too. PM
Google Strikes Back
Not to be outdone by all the Microsoft hullabaloo, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced some next steps in the AI and search spaces. They're introducing Bard, a chat bot with capabilities similar to ChatGPT - but using Google's approach to large language models called LaMDA. LaMDA is the one powering the earlier chat bot that a Google engineer became convinced was sentient. That guy got fired, so draw your own conclusions about the influential powers of a chat bot.
Google has a bit more reputation to lose in the search space, and they acknowledge as much by saying they're making sure Bard meets high standards. On the one hand, you can see where that makes a TON of sense. If your company is known for, above anything else, informative and correct search…you're taking a big risk if you let a weirdo AI off the chain that can just make things up (like ChatGPT is known to do). Discretion is the better part of valor there.
But on the other hand, it's exactly that kind of caution that makes it possible to be leapfrogged. It's too early to tell, but it's certainly instructive to see the mind-blowing capabilities of chat bots come to the front of the public consciousness from a company other than Google. Especially given how much Google has contributed to the research space in AI over the last few decades.
In this case, the enterprise perspective is harder to glean. Pichai calls out making a "Generative Language API" available to developers, creators, and enterprises. There's verbiage of "intend" and "will be" all over the place. But it's clear that Google views itself as having lagged behind implementation-wise, and ChatGPT has been the fire lit under its seat. PM
ABAP Steampunk’d
“Why we should use Embedded Steampunk On Premise?” asked recently an SAP Community member in a blog post comment. (Embedded Steampunk has been rebranded as “On-stack developer extensibility with SAP S/4HANA Cloud ABAP Environment” but I’ll use old term here for brevity.)
The short answer is “why not?” I guess the question everyone is thinking about but is afraid to ask though is: “what are the specific advantages of using Embedded Steampunk in on-premise systems?”
Availability aside (SAP customers will probably get to S/4HANA 2022 in 2025-ish), the answer will depend on whether Cloud readiness is important for your organization. And if it is, how much time/effort do you plan to invest in it and when?
The Big Bad Cloud is coming for most of us, let’s face it. ABAP development is driven by the business needs, we are a cost center. Not all teams will get an opportunity to sit down and think about their Cloud readiness approach, then execute. I bet many customers will choose to just kick the “Cloud readiness can” down the road.
Also, business requirements need to be met (like yesterday) and management doesn’t care much how it’s achieved. It’s not unusual to try the “proper way” but then realize it’s taking too much time with no result, then panic and go back to a not-so-proper way that actually works. Until SAP irons out many API wrinkles and provides more and better examples, I suspect this will happen a lot.
These challenges are similar to moving from ECC to S/4HANA, but the differences here are more significant than getting rid of SELECT *. It doesn’t mean that ABAPers should just give up like “oh well, nothing we can do”. At minimum, we need to keep learning about “new ways” and applying them whenever possible. When it’s not, try to make eventual Cloud teardown and renovation as simple as possible. We all will cross the Cloud bridge when we get there. JP
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Another awesome newsletter issue from Jelena and Paul! These folks are on fire! :)