The Boring Enterprise Nerdletter #14: Sapphire, SOAR, ABAP, FIDO, Google Cloud
Hi there,
This issue includes fine reporting from the SAP Sapphire conference: from intrepid field correspondent Paul and stately desk anchor Jelena back at the station. You'll find that our views differ based on physical proximity to the conference.
One might say that Sapphire is the crown jewel of the SAP conferences. Or that Sapphire was on fire! And that’s where one runs out of the sapphire puns.
Enjoy!
-Jelena and Paul
An Enterprise Nerd Goes To Sapphire
I attended SAP Sapphire 2022 in person in Orlando. As a new SAP Mentor, I got lucky and scored a ticket. It may have been hot and sweaty outside, but it was worth the trip. Here are my unfiltered thoughts:
Every day featured a morning keynote presentation. As I get older (and wiser, of course) I find my preference for cut-through-the-BS storytelling growing stronger. Every keynote moment that moved away from a real-life customer story was a moment that risked losing my attention.
The second day keynote presentation featured a story about Casey's reimagining their consumer app experience, and that resonated STRONGLY with me. It also made me hungry, because damn if Casey's doesn't actually have some of the best gas station pizza in the world. I'm from Iowa, and every time I go back home I stop at a Casey's gas station.
Sustainability made an appearance in several places. I think turning the business world toward that goal will be one of the most impactful things we can do in enterprise software.
The show floor experience was better. There were fewer people present, but the show occupied the same square footage as earlier years, so it was a little easier to breathe.
I heard several people make comments like "I don't know if it's just how excited I am to be around people again, but I feel like this is the best Sapphire in years!" - I have to agree. In the past I judged a conference based on the announcements of new tech, ideas, and approaches; under that grading scheme, this Sapphire would have been a bust. But I'm into stories, and connections, and communication now…and under that scheme, this Sapphire was great. PM
Sapphire 2022: A View from The Peanut Gallery
There was something ominous in Sapphire not being spelled in all caps this year. Typically the grand sales event, it seemed subdued and even though SAP published a long list of news, there wasn't technology or product news that particularly stood out. And the ho-hum online content felt like a “hybrid event done, boss” checkmark.
It was good to hear an acknowledgement that partnerships are important for SAP and I’d love to hear more about the next steps. Especially for the partners that are somewhere between The Big 4 and an edgy startup (for which SAP has yet another program). Also ASUG Annual conference was co-located with Sapphire, as usual, but it was barely even mentioned anywhere. Not sure what’s up with that.
The eye-rolling moments for me were the appearances of the “mobile executive dashboard” and AR/VR devices. The dashboard was interesting when it was first presented at TechEd around 2015, in full HANA glory. Now it’s also on mobile. OK, cool. And I think we should face the reality that people just don’t like wearing any AR/VR things for work. Let’s deliver solutions for devices that people actually use (laptops, cough).
Overall, if you took all the buzzwords and marketing speak from SAP Sapphire, it would be as short as The Sopranos with all the cursing edited out for broadcast TV. JP
RISE, SOAR, And Then…?
I can see the value in a program like RISE with SAP, from at least one perspective: giving customers one neck to choke that covers both software and cloud infra/platform licensing. Lots of new SAP customers are choosing it - though I don't know if existing customers upgrading to S/4HANA are going along with RISE to the degree that SAP would like.
What I didn't know about RISE until Sapphire was that Accenture has a complementary program, called "SOAR with Accenture". Since it's not a competitor for RISE, I got curious to find out exactly what SOAR is. Here are some facts:
SOAR has a "move your business to the cloud" feel similar to RISE.
In Accenture's words, SOAR "brings pre-configured industry solutions, business process models, extensibility architectures, end-to-end delivery capabilities, cloud-native technologies, and industry cloud solutions all driven and delivered by Accenture myConcerto."
I feel like descriptions like the one above are word-dense but information-sparse. I can't really tell what SOAR means from that.
myConcerto is an "insight-driven, digitally integrated platform that orchestrates the power of new SAP solutions and technologies, and Accenture's industry and functional expertise to create exponential business outcomes."
Word-dense, information-sparse.
I feel like sometimes I miss the point of big consulting firms' programs. Maybe it's my engineer side looking for a concise, packaged-up thing, when those companies are in the business of selling ideas tied to person-hours of labor.
SOAR has the same problem that I outlined with the general SAP Sapphire keynotes: if you don't tell a story, you start to lose me. I can't find SOAR customer stories on Accenture's website, so until I can hear someone outside of Accenture tell me what they actually got, I remain in the dark. PM
ABAP Hath Risen Again
ABAP, the roly-poly of zombies, is on the rise again!
First, a big announcement from SAP: the learning journey Get Started With ABAP Programming on SAP BTP is the official, free, and I’d say first cohesive course for the ABAP beginners. It’s surprisingly good and my only gripe is that SAP just haaaaad to slap “SAP BTP” brand on it. It covers core ABAP syntax and many classic ABAP concepts that have nothing to do with SAP BTP and would work in any ABAP version. With all the gratuitous branding, it’s still a huge step forward in ABAP education. Imagine if this was available 20 years ago.
Also, the massive list of new features and improvements in CDS view entities was shared on SAP Community. The view entities have been available for some time but were lacking some functionality. Set operators UNION, EXCEPT, INTERSECT, useful functions, and extensions are just some of the highlights. I’ve really warmed up to the view entities, they are so much faster to generate and simpler to use. Highly recommend getting to know them better. JP
Partnership Watch XXIII: Google's Revenge
If you've read the Nerdletter in the past, you'll see that I'm pretty openly a Google Cloud fanboy. (If this is your first one, welcome! I'm Paul, a Google Cloud fanboy.) I think GCP has understood platforms for a while now, and as a developer I've always loved the Google tools.
Recently SAP and Google announced a key partnership in making S/4HANA data available to Google Workspace (think Google Docs and Google Sheets). While somewhat light on details, news releases keyed on the collaborative features of Docs and Sheets. Think of your favorite old-timey WinShuttle data in Excel - now imagine that same functionality but in your browser-based spreadsheet and/or on your mobile device. I'm sure there are other features, but that's where my mind goes first.
It's also where I was thinking a few years ago. My old company, Mindset Consulting, released a Sheets add-on that let users take SAP Gateway OData services and bring that data into the spreadsheet for two-way viewing and editing of SAP data. The add-on is gone from the Sheets store, but you can still see the source code at the open-source repository.
There was a major stumbling block back in 2014-2015 to selling that tool: almost no companies who used large SAP installations also used Google as their productivity suite. Does this new announcement mean that situation has changed? Does Google anticipate a larger set of enterprises making the choice to run Workspace? That would completely change the equation for lots of Microsoft Excel-based SAP data solutions. PM
FIDO2: Our Passwordless Future?
When it comes to authentication, people mostly just want it to be simple. And IT wants it to be safe and secure. How can we have both? There is an app, I mean, an alliance for that!
FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) alliance is on track to passwordless future with recent commitment from Apple, MS, and Google. FIDO2 standard (already recommended by the US federal government) supports passwordless authentication with public key credentials. Instead of the passwords, users authenticate via physical devices, very much like you’d unlock a phone using a fingerprint, for example.
As an SAP consultant, I deal with dozens of passwords daily. And what sucks even more than the passwords are all those “security” policies. Asking users to change passwords frequently, requiring special characters and a blood of virgin in the password – all of this has been proven ineffective. Even two-factor authentication (2FA) is not as solid: just type in 2FA in Google and you’ll get prompts like “2FA bypass tool”. Ouch.
Enterprise apps are typically late to such parties (e.g. not long ago SAP still had the weirdest requirement for exactly 8-character passwords in some of their services) but I hope that CIOs bet on FIDO2 rather than yet another password manager app. Off with the passwords, I say. JP
Bonus Content: Shameless Plug
If you haven't listened to our podcast, maybe you'd like to watch instead? Jelena and Paul talked to Paul Hardy about all things ABAP on the latest episode of The Boring Enterprise Nerdcast.