#42 SAP+AI, CIOs criticize, Oracle, OData, 20

Hi there,

I scream, you scream… You know the drill. Speaking of ice cream. A 2009 study discovered that ice cream parlor customers were more happy when they had fewer flavors to choose from. This seems counter-intuitive but the maximization paradox applies to the enterprise software world as well. Sometimes it feels like there might be too many SAP products or ABAP models or online courses. When all we want is just vanilla and chocolate.

By the way, are you Team Chocolate like Paul or Team Vanilla like Jelena? Drop us a comment! In the meantime, please enjoy these 6 stories that are anything but plain vanilla.

-Jelena and Paul

SAP Throws Money At Skynet

SAP is reaching into their piggy bank to do some generative AI investing. By throwing money at Aleph Alpha GmbH, Anthropic PBC, and Cohere, they are looking to create "an enterprise AI ecosystem for the future that complements our world-class business applications suite and helps our customers unlock their full potential." Those are…lofty words, perhaps a bit too pie-in-the-sky to communicate concrete plans. 

Aleph Alpha makes Luminous, a series of multi-modal models with a multilingual/EU-first approach of English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. Anthropic makes the well-known Claude assistant, both standalone and composable for enterprises. Cohere does…well, the same things as these other ones. Things we're all familiar with LLMs doing, like summarization, chatting, and generating creative text. 

A multi-pronged approach to this investment, in companies producing relatively similar products, is a pretty fair tell that SAP believes in the generative AI space even if they don't have an appetite to deeply research and create it in-house. And, as noted in my Oracle story below, Cohere is actually in play for both SAP and Oracle - if Cohere crushes it for Oracle's HCM and other products, SAP stands to benefit via their investment. Christian Klein said that he sees AI doubling the size of SAP's addressable market up to $1 trillion by 2028. But if you are the ones producing the thing that drives that market growth, I think you stand to benefit far more. PM

Oracle Is Also At The Party

Oracle enters the generative AI battlefield with an announcement of capabilities to "help HR boost productivity". 'Enters' might be a strong word - the tone I get from the piece is "coming soon to a GPU near you".

They tout three new capabilities: assisted authoring (write me a job requisition or performance goal), suggestions ("development tips" for managers to give their underlings, and others), and summarization ("surfacing key insights from one or more data sources"). Their wording is "include", so I'd assume many other features are baking right now. 

These new capabilities are right in line with many of the large language model benefits that have come to light in the last year. Other solutions out in the world offer job description creation, ChatGPT is phenomenal at summarizing things, and so on. One thing I'm curious about: as an example, how much time would a typical HR employee who works up job descriptions save with a feature like what's been proposed here? 

I also note that Oracle is using Cohere as one of their main partners in this endeavor. SAP also recently announced an investment in Cohere (see that story above in this very issue!). It seems clear that, since both the ERP players in this conversation are leaning on a player engaged deeper into the research, the biggest winners in the generative AI will be those who operate at the lowest level, producing the core AI itself. PM

CIOs in Roundtables Criticizing SAP

This is what an executive roundtable looks like, according to DALL-E

German publication Datacenter Insider posted an article with the title that barely needs translation: CIOs vermissen bei SAP den End-to-End-Fokus. (Google does a decent job with translation in case you need it.) In addition to missing end-to-end focus at SAP, CIOs had the following concerns.

The quest for an elusive business case for migrating from ECC to S/4HANA is becoming more and more like the famous scene from Idiocracy. (“It’s got the electrolytes! - What are the electrolytes? - It’s what the plants need!”) Quote from the article (translation by Google):

“The changeover went well, but so far we have not been able to calculate a business case.”

DSAG has already been pointing fingers at how on-premise customers are getting neglected. CIOs have more to add. We’ve all heard of Clean Core but after all the cleaning, will it actually have the functionality that customers expect? With some components that were included in Business Suite now having to be mapped to BPT extensions, will the customers be left handing the bag? Sebastian Westphal says:

“[…]it cannot be that users close the gaps in the SAP portfolio with third-party software or in-house developments. In its very own core business, with which it grew up, SAP has to fully map the requirements.”

Pricing is always a hot topic in SAP world. The article diplomatically summarized this as “complex pricing models and a difficult cost-benefit calculation”. I might be like that kid in The Emperor’s New Clothes tale but why is SAP pricing always so complicated though? It’s been 50 years already, is it really not possible to make it simpler? You don’t even need any technology or system redesign for that, just some good will and decisiveness. JP

OData Development in SAP Through Times

First, there was light… I mean SAP Gateway. Available from around 2011, it brought to life transaction SEGW to be used for OData service development. The typical process in SEGW involved importing a dictionary structure to generate ABAP class templates, then writing lots of code to actually make it do something. SAP Community hay day of this code-based OData development model was around 2015-2016. Many blog posts were written, including this piece by Andre Fischer, The Godfather of SAP Gateway himself.

Around 2016, SAP came up with the ABAP Fiori programming model. It introduced CDS views into the mix, which was a relief from all the boilerplate manual coding in SEGW. But those “business objects”… Oof. Thankfully, this model’s fall from grace was just as swift as its rise. In 2018, ABAP RAP model was born, and it continues to rule the SAP OData world to this day, now as part of the broader ABAP Cloud concept. (This post from 2019 is a good overview of this evolution.)

I’m writing this not just to tell you how “back in the days” we had to write our own code and “kids these days” have it easy. Sadly, SAP developers are frequently seduced by backwards compatibility. Even though the classic code-based approach has already been declared passé in that 2019 blog post, we keep seeing posts talking about it like it’s the Holy Grail of OData development. Here we are in 2020, 2021, 2022. Same thing: go to SEGW, import VBAK, redefine …DPC_EXT methods, step 3 profit.

I love SEGW as much as the next person but folks, it’s 2023. ABAP RAP is 5 years old.

It is important to be aware of the legacy development models. There are many old systems out there that need to be supported. And yes, sometimes we still use SEGW anyway if nothing else works. But do yourself (and those who will come after you) a favor, skill up and start using what is appropriate for your system. Friends don’t let friends abuse SEGW. Help your team to move up and move on! JP

Debt-free Code: C++ vs ABAP

From the “random stuff I stumbled upon on YouTube” department: How Google writes debt free code. I don’t usually program in C++, as Google does, but it was interesting to draw parallels with ABAP.

Good stuff: I’m glad we don’t need to have “tabs vs spaces” debates. Pretty Printer takes care of it in SAP while it’s apparently a huge deal in the outside development world. 

Strange stuff: I found the “no exceptions” rule a bit odd. I get Google’s reasoning but for SAP development that wouldn’t make sense. Actually, I wish exceptions were used more in ABAP instead of sy-subrc and such.

Interesting stuff: “no multiple inheritance” rule. [ABAP developers: “What’s ‘inheritance’? LOL”] Lately we’ve been hearing more about composition over inheritance and Google seems to agree. In ABAP, this post’s title “Simple Isn’t Easy” sums up the situation nicely, I think.

How does ABAP development compare to other languages? Let us know your controversial opinion in the comments! JP

Twenty: An Open-Source CRM

Hit me up for that IPO advice, Patrick

I saw Twenty launch on Hacker News last week. It's an open-source CRM application, and since I've been on this Odoo kick for open-source business software, I had to stop in and check it out.

Working with enterprise-y tools all day makes me appreciate the scrappy, fast, opinionated viewpoint of fresh ideas, and Twenty is no exception. I enjoyed poking around in the app (which you can try yourself).

• Such a great, fast, slick UI. The Opportunities board has a sweet Trello-ish drag-the-cards-around interaction, the app works on mobile right away (including the drag-drop), and has a dark UI option. 

• The documentation cares about the people who will go out, extend, and create more on top of or beside it.

• Coming soon: 

  • Extending with TypeScript? 🤌 😙

  • "Making it easy to connect data sources, and fetch data in real-time like in BI tools" - yes. If you're making something at this level for this purpose and you don't do that…you've missed the way everyone does these things.

• Pretty slick little feature, I added a company and gave it a website…Twenty went out and got the favicon automagically.

Free, unsolicited, and probably-already-thought-of advice for the Twenty team:

• Give users the ability to export ALL THE THINGS. Everyone will eventually want a spreadsheet to grab a list and do some quick slicing. 

• Relatedly, make it easy to do pretty reports. Look into how Tableau and Power BI work and make sure your thing can dump its data into those things. 

• Think about the way to do notifications for things like opportunities changing hands or adding new leads. 

• Even tiny companies often need more than one person to have the pieces they're responsible for, so you may want to think about UI experiences like "My Opportunities" - make it super fast to drill right to what is assigned to you. 

This is just begging to be forked into a cool offering that mashes it up with other open-source applications like Odoo. Slice up all the right bits and make your own perfect-for-you total software experience for your business. PM

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