The Boring Enterprise Nerdletter - Issue #4 - December 22, 2021
Hey there!
One year ago, our only wish for the new year was “please, don’t let it be worse than 2020”. 2021 was the year of hope. With COVID vaccines approved for adults and kids, return of some events and travel, it definitely delivered.
For us, it was also the year when The Boring Enterprise Nerdletter was born (or spontaneously exploded, depending on how you look at it). In the new year, we hope to continue to inform, entertain, and prompt you to ask more questions about technology. Let 2022 be The Year of Curiosity.
To all our readers and fellow enterprise nerds,
Have a Merry Quarter Close and a Happy Year-End!
-Jelena and Paul
Our Top 8 Predictions For 2022
Only 3 things in life are certain: death, taxes, and SAP product renaming. It’s not about whether any products will be renamed, it’s about how many. I wager stuffy SAP executives will try to purge Steampunk nomenclature and replace it with something boring while customers merrily use whatever terminology already stuck. JP
The work from home revolution is no longer a revolution: home-based work has won. I predict that if your work is done largely in front of a computer, your next job will either be remote or will offer you the opportunity to work remotely. PM
Automation allows enterprises to take poorly designed business processes and run them real fast. Why stop to think about what we are doing? No time to waste, gotta deploy those robots. Plot twist: SAP-related automations in 2022 will use not SAP iRPA but better competitor products. JP
SAP TechEd will remain online but we will see more in-person and hybrid events. JP
Low-code and no-code will skyrocket, but AppGyver will not achieve the same trajectory as offerings from Microsoft or Salesforce. PM
SAP BTP has a free tier. This is a good thing for developers, and I think we'll see a significant uptick in developer skill acquisition in BTP services and tools. In terms of BTP adoption overall, the other thing to add to this equation is customer adoption. To improve BTP adoption in the marketplace, SAP needs to improve its messaging around the necessary reasons to choose BTP services. I predict that BTP growth will not be what people hoped for in 2022, as many customers who integrate SAP with other systems do not yet see the value in the BTP argument. PM
SAP's current end-of-support date for ECC is 2027. I predict that date will move to 2269, to ensure that the starship Enterprise can make its 5-year mission without needing to convert to S/4HANA. PM
After 13 years of being petitioned via SAP Community blogs, in 2022, SAP will finally officially release Editable SALV! It will require a subscription to SAP BTP, paid per-user monthly service license, and will run only on Tuesdays. Mission accomplished! JP
Enterprise Christmas Fun
It’s the most wonderful time of the year when the enterprise software vendors jump on to spread Christmas cheer and subtle marketing messages.
SAP’s marketing department did not pass the opportunity to post an “ermahgerd, supply chain” article that has something to do with Santa.
In SAP Community, there is timeless ABAPer’s Christmas Carol classic, unexpected Chief Data Officer’s Christmas poem, and updated for 2021 (keep up with your security patches, folks!) GRC Carol. Die-hard techies can make it snow in Fiori and of course, there are annual greetings from ABAP enthusiast Michael Keller.
Oracle definitely takes the Christmas Corporate Cringe cake with their “hold my beer” Santa’s Cloud Workshop news page. It doubles as a night-time story for your wee ones: nothing puts a kid (or an adult) to sleep faster than “Santa’s Autonomous Database provides a secure, high-performance environment that automates upgrades and patches without manual processes by any creature—human or magical”. Oof.
On the fun side of the enterprise software vendor island, we have Google’s annual Santa Tracker and Microsoft’s Minesweeper-themed ugly sweaters, which are totally not ugly and, unfortunately, all sold out already. Also, back in 2020, Microsoft's Twitter account surprised the world by posting an ad for a fake Christmas song album. The album included such smash hits as “Please Mute Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “Bingle Bells”. All brought to you by “Reply All Records”.
JP and PM
Distributed SQL, But Highly Concentrated $$$
Cockroach Labs, the company that makes CockroachDB, raised $278 million in Series F funding, at a valuation of $5 billion. Any fans of GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) out there? Cockroach Labs CEO and co-founder Spencer Kimball created that.
I call attention to this story because every year I find out more about the continuing evolution of databases. Back when I first learned SQL against Oracle, I didn't have the wherewithal to realize that databases would continue to evolve. It seemed like everything was kinda…set in stone. Just point your SQL queries at ever-larger database servers.
But the distributed model of cloud computing turned that on its head. CockroachDB is part of a fascinating new category of databases known as "distributed SQL". It used to be that databases were monoliths: you'd have one central system that was the keeper of all the writable information, and perhaps a few replicas of that system providing fast read-only query access to data. You were constrained by physical reality by needing to have your transactional data on one machine.
Distributed SQL turns that upside down. Starting with Google's Cloud Spanner database and continuing on to vendors like Cockroach Labs, it's now possible to distribute a single database over hundreds or even thousands of geographically separated systems, and you no longer have to have only one system be the master transaction-maker. You can set up a database that can survive an outage like the AWS outage mentioned below, with no downtime and no data lost. (This is why Cockroach has its name: you can't kill it!) You can even ensure that certain data is stored in certain physical locations, so that local users of apps get the fastest response to their application needs in their home countries.
I've been learning a lot about distributed SQL lately, and I'm sure it'll come up again in this newsletter. PM
Oracle: Our Cloud Is Cloudier Than Your Cloud
In the SAP ecosystem, Oracle is almost a taboo subject. Sure, some SAP ECC systems out there still run on Oracle DB but in general, it’s like Fight Club: we don’t speak of it. But hearing about a sudden Oracle’s stock price surge, I got curious about the grass on the other side of the fence.
The investors ran to buy Big Red’s stock “shut up and take my money” style on the news of strong earnings and license revenues. Larry Ellison apparently went on a rant in the earning call calling hybrid cloud “ridiculous” and boasting how Oracle’s cloud never, ever goes down. I’m seriously considering calling in next time, this sounds fun.
But just a few days later, ORCL price dipped when news emerged of Oracle’s potential acquisition of healthcare IT giant Cerner Corp (since then the deal was confirmed). Unless you work in healthcare, Cerner is like one of the biggest IT companies you've never heard of. Oddly, their HQ is in Kansas City, which is (fun fact!) located not in Kansas but in Missouri state. US geography is weird.
The healthcare industry can be a good investment (after all, everyone needs it all the time), but some forays into it, like IBM Watson Health did not go well. Time will tell which way the investor roulette spins, but one thing is certain: many folks in Kansas City will be posting their resumes online soon. Perhaps they should apply at SAP? JP
WARNING: COMPUTERS STILL NOT PERFECT
Would you rather have your automatic cat litter cleaner stop working, or lose the ability to maximize spectral efficiency on optical links? Two recent incidents have rocked the software world: a major AWS outage in the eastern US, and a serious vulnerability in Apache Log4j, a popular Java logging utility. The AWS outage was restored in the course of about half a day, while it is up to software engineers across the world to update their programs to fix the Log4j vulnerability. Both these incidents give me pause to think.
Regarding the AWS incident: cloud infrastructure and platforms are ubiquitous in the daily life of vast swaths of the web. That a single vendor experiencing an outage in just one of their regions can cause this much chaos is not a comforting thought. Surely this hiccup caused many millions of dollars in economic damage.
But there's a bright side here. I remember when system outages had no estimated recovery timeframe, and there was no realistic capability to distribute loads to other regions. This outage was bad, but surely most of the businesses running software in AWS have seen fewer major outages than if they were managing their own infrastructure. And whether it's AWS or other hyperscalers, it's almost a comfort to know that a bunch of very smart people have fires lit under them to solve the problem - then go on and make sure that particular problem NEVER EVER happens again. On balance, even major outages like this one do not cause fear in me about the cloud.
Regarding the Log4j vulnerability: open-source software runs everything. Vulnerabilities are exposed every day. It's absolutely a calculated risk to run things with open-source libraries and utilities.
And often, that risk calculation works out in favor of using the open-source software. Two things really tip the balance. First, building on top of trusted open-source tools leads to success in development that could otherwise take years to create and IP-protect in-house. Second, when a vulnerability like this occurs, the nature of the open-source community means that fixes and mitigations spread quickly.
I'm a glass-half-full kind of person. I think in both cases it is still a greater good that the affected thing exists, whether it's the cloud or open-source software. PM
Window of Opportunity with Window Functions
The SAP Community blog New Window Functions in ABAP SQL caught my attention because the title included keywords “new” and “ABAP”.
ABAPers should already be familiar with the concept of aggregate functions, such as SUM or MAX. We would use those if we wanted, say, to find a most recent order date or a total amount for a fiscal period. But if you are after a more analytical query, like “give me a list of revenues by state by country”, then a window function (aka analytic function) could help. These functions have syntax like “SELECT <function>… OVER … FROM …” where "window" is the part that follows OVER keyword.
I learned most interesting information about window functions (and then some) not from the blog itself but rather from the insightful replies to my Twitter post on this subject. As Paul wrote in the last Nerdletter issue, it’s important to ask questions, even stupid ones. And I’m glad I posted my not necessarily correct TLDR version (turns out there are people actually using these functions).
We get a lot of content like "look ma, new feature!" from SAP but usually not the whole lot of information on why would anyone care. Where would developers use this cool feature and how would it add business value? There is a clear window of opportunity for SAP to help answer these questions. JP