#66: SAP CTO, ABAP x2, Oracle CloudWorld
In this issue:
Put “T” Back in SAP CTO
After the news about sudden SAP CTO departure broke out, social media got swollen with “what did he do?” questions. I don’t have any juicy deets to dish out, “is said to have approached an employee inappropriately at an event a few weeks ago” from the German newspapers is the most detailed account.
In the press release, Mueller was thanked for “his significant accomplishments”. Uh… what accomplishments? Renaming of Cloud Platform? Sunsetting popular SAP Build and [ab]using its name for the “suite” of unrelated products? Mueller’s tenure includes layoffs, kerfuffle with customers about “innovation in Cloud only”, still no clear business case for S/4HANA, demise of both TechEd events and SAP Community, openSAP closure. Granted, these were not all CTO’s decisions but as a board member, surely Mueller must have had some input.
And why did Mueller get the job in the first place? The previous charismatic CTO Bjoern Goerke was an SAP practitioner for years before climbing SAP management ladder. Mueller’s LI profile shows the path of a typical apparatchik, which rarely works out for a CTO or CIO. It’s like a general who hasn’t spent a day in the trenches. Good luck inspiring your troops.
I hope that whoever fills up the vacant position will read the comments in this post. These are the words from the people who actually use the “T” you are the “CO” of. If I had to summarize the sentiment, I’d say that what got lost in the recent years is the sense that we (the whole SAP ecosystem) are in this together. We are technologists (well, except for Mueller) who are passionate about what we do. But the bridges were burned and the walls were built between SAP and the rest of the world on the last CTO’s watch. Now the next guy (or gal? well, one can dream) has the work cut out for them. JP
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Why Can't We Be (Cloud) Friends?
Oracle CloudWorld 2024 kicked off Sept 10 with a keynote from Larry Ellison. Larry (I call him "Lar-Bear", he calls me "leave me alone, weirdo". We have fun.) drove home two main topic items in his hour on the main stage: the "Open MultiCloud Era" and "AI + Cloud Security". I will ASSIDUOUSLY AVOID the AI discussion here and zoom in on the "cloud" piece, since "cloud" is the common thing. (And because I'm getting sick of hearing myself talk about AI.)
MultiCloud is all about Oracle partnering with major cloud infrastructure providers to literally co-host Oracle cloud services inside their data centers. Think of it this way: an Oracle Cloud datacenter embedded inside an AWS datacenter. I'd be fascinated to learn what kind of NDAs/agreements/financial arrangements are set up to make this happen. Seems like it'd take a heck of a lot of legal wrangling.
So many cloud customers are multi-cloud these days that it feels like a no-brainer. And what if, in the future, Oracle isn't alone in setting up shared datacenter space? Will we have AWS Google Microsoft Oracle HyperGiga Datacenter Complexes? Will you be able to get a Mega-Platinum All Access Cloud membership? Will any of them make better web portals? Probably not. PM
ABAP + TechEd
It’s weird that with ABAP development still playing a huge role in running SAP systems worldwide, ABAP-themed content is getting more and more hard to come by at SAP events. But the knowledge well hasn’t dried out completely just yet.
Carine Tchoutouo Djomo (one of the few SAP people to follow for useful ABAP information) shared the list of ABAP sessions in the upcoming virtual TechEd. Some of these are keynotes that everyone will likely watch but I’m also intrigued by DT100 (future innovations) and AD107 (ABAP + Joule).
Prior to TechEd, the annual Devtoberfest will also have some ABAP sessions. Don’t miss Understand the Clean Core Extensibility Options for Cloud ERP with Carine herself and Andre Fischer presenting. And I’m curious what is the deal with those new external entities (sounds either like something awesome or just meh, haven’t quite figured it out yet). See you in the comment section! JP
Haiku Redux
I’m at it again. I just love ABAP-y wordiness. I don’t get to program in ABAP quite as much these days, but when I do…it feels so expressive.
This time, I’ve got three. The first deals with that feeling that you’ve tackled too much and have no psychological space for anything else, the second tries to capture an angle on that weird beautiful feeling of moving from summer to autumn, and the last one is about how it feels to shift rapidly from dreaming to waking while the boundary between is still malleable.
At least one is written by me, at least one is written by a large language model. Can you figure out which is which? PM
// low function
TASKS LEAVE NULL BETWEEN
BOXED BY INTENSIFIED LINES
ALL STATIC NO SPACE// conversion interval
LAST DAYLIGHT CHANGING
GREEN TRANSFORM TO YELLOW RED
TIME REDUCE APPEND// up shift
DEEP CATCH MEMORY
INCLUDING TRANSFORMATION
BASE RESUMABLEThis One Neat Trick
Maybe it's time to take another AI break: I'm saturated. It's not that I'm sick of the deep source material - that's fascinating! It's all the overblown attempts to shovel garbage about AI-powered-something-or-other into my eyeballs. My brain craves information nutrition, not…whatever it is that passes for stories about AI these days.
Read this Capgemini blog and tell me one actual, useful, intriguing detail from it. I don't think I could. It's full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. No, scratch that: it's not full of sound and fury, because that would imply some sort of emotional force. It's been flattened out and watered down by ChatGPT. It is too heavy with words to actually say anything.
Here's my extremely valuable advice: this Capgemini press release should show the way. (No, not the press release itself.) Look at this quote:
I've been to workshops and planning meetings and requirements-gathering sessions with folks wanting to use gen AI. I 100% absolutely guarantee that a simple video highlighting that one case and NOTHING ELSE would win the hearts and minds of so many. Just tell the story. People will get it. PM
The Great Prioritization Misunderstanding
If you ever worked on an Agile project, you must understand the importance of backlog prioritization. We purposely try to capture more ideas that we might be able to implement (Agile process is an endless loop that only stops when you run out of time or budget) but then we need to decide what to focus on first.
I’ve always wondered why we sometimes oddly end up with either everything or nothing being a high priority and this article was an a-ha moment. Turns out that the “customers” and the “makers” have opposite views on what prioritization means. The customers think that the goal of prioritization is to mark EVERYTHING they want (as the author calls it, “prioritize in”). But the makers view it as prioritizing the “must haves” and let the rest drop to the bottom (“prioritize out”).
Maybe together with “definition of done” some projects also need a definition of priority. This would be especially useful in preventing “whoever screams the loudest gets their way”. JP
Watch the Nerdletter Talk 66 video for our discussion on these stories!
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