#43: SAP Standoff, ServiceNow does AI, Tech Conferences, ABAP Nice, ERPNext
Hi there,
AI-generated jokes are great, but we promise our writing is biologically-sourced.
-Jelena and Paul
SAP and Customers: The Mexican Standoff
In the ongoing SAP vs Customers tournament, SAP just pulled a trump card out of their sleeve by raising on-premise ERP support cost. CIO Magazine chimed in:
First came the carrot of lower costs in the cloud with the bundled Rise with SAP offering. Now here comes the stick.
The shareholders are liking this: SAP stock is doing well lately. But I wonder if the stick came out prematurely while the carrot was not as sweet as might have been presumed. Isn’t this also the same stick SAP used before when gently encouraging customers to adopt HANA? The CIOs are still not clear on what was the business benefit of that but now even more sacrifice to the altar of SAP is needed? What’s up with that?
I enjoyed reading Thomas Otter’s piece on this debacle with delicious nuggets like “SAP now has more cloud varieties than a meteorology chart” and “trying to paint each of these renovations as massive innovations that are simultaneously somehow not disruptive”. (Sick burn!) While some comments on LI disagree that DSAG suffers from “ERPstalgie”, as Thomas suggests, the fact that any relationship involves at least two sides remains.
I hope some kind of parley will happen soon to sort out the current Mexican standoff between SAP and the customers (largely represented by DSAG with ASUG also waking up). As an SAP practitioner, I’m honestly tired already of all these politics and just want to do some nice things with technology for our customers. Regardless of where their premises are. JP
Techie Conference Cambrian Explosion
Feathers were ruffled when SAP announced the in-person locations for TechEd 2023…this is not news. But I have a couple new reflections on what's going on in the community ecosystem in the last couple years.
First, TechEd's length (2 days this year) and limited physical presence has created a space for other in-person experiences. In the Americas, ASUG is stepping up to the plate with Tech Connect 2023, a 3-day community gathering in New Orleans. We've written about it before already - the Boring Nerds' take is that we believe this is the right idea, and hopefully the event delivers on the gap. In Europe, SAPinsider has a 3-day Innovation & Technology Conference 2023 - which as far as I can tell is a new experience. There's also the repeat upcoming ABAPconf, more narrowly focused but also more passionate for developer nerds. None of these events are directly created by SAP. That is a good thing.
Second, these events will start to answer a question I keep stumbling across in my own head: what is the size and shape of the SAP techie community? I have a couple theories: 1) the group of folks with traditional, born-and-bred RICEFW-like skills is not expanding as it once was, 2) the group of folks who have SAP as one-of-several of their skill sets is expanding. This includes people with Basis-like admin skills but also general-purpose hyperscaler admin skills, and developers in and around SAP who are comfortable with the web-ish skills that SAPUI5 and CAP encourage.
I'm interested as a nerd and as a sort of sociological community moment. Connected to this, Jelena and I will soon be capturing our spiciest hot takes on the latest SAP Developer Insights survey - the best example of a community survey I've seen, and a possible source of hypotheses for my questions. The folks behind it genuinely care, and it shows. PM
ServiceNow: AI, Now!
I’ve already written about SAP’s forays into generative AI at Sapphire, and Oracle’s recent announcements. As huge as those players are, they’re just the slightest morsel out of the massive buffet of generative AI solutions laid out for hungry enterprises. So let’s take a look at ServiceNow (whose CEO Bill McDermott was once SAP CEO).
Now Assist is the central component of their generative AI experiences. In its current state, it focuses on four use cases:
Case summarization. Reducing work for service agents would be core for most ServiceNow customers, since its most popular use seems to be IT service management case handling.
Conversational exchanges. At this point, you could probably just say “copilot” and everyone would know what’s being done here.
Content creation. This is probably the most fascinating one to me, explained below.
Text-to-code. ServiceNow has upped their developer and low-code platforms over the last few years, so this is a natural extension.
Read more for their overall AI approach, partnership with NVIDIA and Accenture, and Generative AI Controller that allows for connecting to other AI providers.
I’m most intrigued by the use case of content creation within work notes and knowledge bases. It’s still very common to need a certain level of guru understanding to search knowledge bases for useful information - you have to know not only your problem but have some vague sense of a possible solution or the component architecture of your domain. But now you can start to see the possibility of asking a knowledge base a basic question, and actually getting a synthesized set of possible solutions tailored to your question. (We’re seeing this emerge at other vendors, too.)
I want to be able to ask my smartest friend, not a search field against a generic article set. The pieces are falling into place for that to become reality. PM
PS - SAP, go ahead and announce that SAP Notes are being fine-tuned into LLMs. I’m sure someone there is already looking into it.
ABAPers Like Nice Things Too
Despite the title, Lars Hvam’s ABAP And Excel, Why Can’t We Just Have Something Nice? is not yet another one of those pesky monthly Excel blog posts in SAP Community. Using popular Excel functionality as an example, Lars is asking why can’t ABAPers have nice things?
His definition of “nice” includes working in different ABAP versions, having a public issues list (and a way to quickly fix those), being easily testable and upgradeable. Hear, hear. Lars is one of the few people who puts money where his mouth is: abapGit is already nice by these accounts. But for some reason SAP seems to be not capable of creating “nice” (and I’d add simple) functionality for many popular development needs.
Another blog post, for example, points that ABAP classes for logging are also all over the place and far from being “nice”, which leads to customers creating their own repeatedly. Now, there is yet another class approved for SAP BTP use which is called… wait for it… CL_BALI_LOG. Not to be confused with CL_BAL_LOG, CL_BAL_LOGGER, CL_BAL_LOGGING and other tributes to the good old Yello song.
I like Lars’s “nice”, and I think maybe we should have Nice Core instead of just Clean one. In fact, I’m not sure one is even possible without the other. JP
Up Next in OSS: ERPNext
We’ve looked at several business software-related open-source products: Twenty (CRM), Odoo (ERP), and also Odoo again. I’m still riding high on the OSS idea here, because it shows the possibilities of finely-crafted software created by passionate nerds.
Today I’m looking at ERPNext, which calls itself “the world’s best free and open source ERP”. Same as many OSS approaches, the source code is available for your own hosting free of charge, or you can pay for the hosted version provided by ERPNext. The “Small Business” edition has a flat fee approach: $50/month, no limit on users. I’ve seen lots of businesses engage in creative ways to reduce their user headcounts - this goes right around that. Neat.
It’s got a nice lineup of modules, including accounting, HR/payroll, manufacturing, sales, CRM, helpdesk, asset management, and a CMS solution. Any ERP worth anything has to have customization, available here for fields, reports, workflows, and bulk updates. The UI is bright, clean, and crisp; a welcome difference from some of the larger ERP players. You know who I’m talking about.
An impressive set of integrations are baked in, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Google services, and payment systems like Stripe. To me, the coolest stuff is the technical capabilities of Frappe, the framework that drives ERPNext. It’s a full-stack web framework written in Python and JavaScript, and provides extension app creation capabilities right out of the box.
I think a separate article is in order for a review of Frappe’s full capability set, but Frappe and ERPNext feel designed for a nerd like me to dig in. PM
Programming with ChatGPT Meets Reality
Everyone must have seen the social media posts where someone prompts for a “hello world” program in Java and - ermagerd! - ChatGPT generates exactly that. It’s all fine and dandy but there is much more to the real development projects than coding to specification.
In his fascinating article Real-Real-World Programming with ChatGPT, Philip Guo investigates how ChatGPT performs beyond “small self-contained programming problems”. It wasn’t off to a great start when ChatGPT produced a deprecated file format without a hint that there might be other options. I saw the same issue with the generated ABAP code shared in SAP Community before: the code wasn’t wrong per se but was far from being clean and included “we don’t do that here” type of functionality.
On the bright side, ChatGPT was able to generate “personalized tutorials” using Philip’s experimental project as an example. In the SAP world, we’ve heard developers struggle with the training data models and generic tutorials that need to be correlated to their real world tasks to be useful. I think this can be a great advantage in learning.
One of Philip's conclusions is: “what you get out of LLMs like ChatGPT is only as good as the prompts you’re able to put in”. I guess we will start seeing “expert ChatGPT prompter” more and more on the developer resumes. JP
Support The Nerdletter
As our European colleagues are slowly returning from their luxurious long summer vacations, please consider supporting this Nerdletter by buying us a cup or two of coffee. Thank you for your continuous readership and support!