on 2007 Aug 22 12:33 AM
Hi,
It seems that outside of the SAP world, Netweaver has zero visibility as a development platform. SAP never comes up during casual conversations around development (dominated by J2EE / .net discussions) and many are even suprised that SAP has a development platform. This got me kind of interested in this topic - what is your opinion - what is the one key thing or "wish", in your opinion that SAP needs to change in order to be better at this (they want to be market leaders!). For me, they have to do something about the proprietary nature - what would scare me is that if I develop on Netweaver, I am tied tightly to SAP and all my work would be "useless" should changes be made unilaterally to the platform or heaven forbid something happens to SAP as a company. Visibility is such that I even didn't realise that there was such a community like the SDN! PS - I was hopping to start a 'coffee corner' discussion, hence the post in this forum. Thank you!!
Request clarification before answering.
Hello,
perhaps the new SDN NetWeaver subscription program will help to get more attention to the NetWeaver Stack. I've just publish a Blog about it: <a href="/people/gregor.wolf3/blog/2007/08/23/sdn-insider-sdn-subscription-program-will-be-launched-soon">SDN Insider: SDN Subscription Program will be launched soon</a>.
Best Regards,
Gregor
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Hello,
One of the problem of the so called Netweaver developement platform is that, in my opinion, it does not exist.
In fact there are 2 SAP development platforms : one on the Abap stack and one on the Java stack.
Products based on one single of these 2 stacks are OK.
Products based on both stacks together are, in my opinion, a very bad solution.
Just look at the nightmare of the double user management and single sign-on configuration between the 2 stacks to pretend the user connect to a single system.
Look at the gigabytes of patches to apply with 2 completely different technologies (SPAM and JSPM).
One other point to the lack of visibility of Netweaver platform is the vocabulary which is very specific and changes completely every 3 months thanks to the SAP marketing guys. Developpers outside of SAP word just don't understand this vocabulary.
Last point, the image of SAP is that of an applications editor and not of a technology vendor.
Regards.
Olivier
hi olivier,
I agree with your assesment and I'd add that either platform scares off the developers and architects of the other platform due to deep resentments based on various grounds. Ironically latter leads to strange redundancies and competition between the two platforms (e.g. how did the ABAP platform team, 'after years of agony' regarding UI matters, come up so quickly with WDA? and does it make sense for Netweaver as a whole?).
concerning your observation of the marketing driven invention of artificial vocuabulary....you are soooo right. I just say Usage Type or ESA. Arghhh.
I'm just spending a rainy holiday to testdrive the latest 'SAP Widget Foundation'. Actually, as far as I understand it after a little bit of hacking it doesn't have anything to do with what is usually called 'widget' (Konfabulator or Yahoo applications written in ECMA script and providing a means to define a UI). It is a little (with a not so small footprint of ~ 60 megs at runtime) homegrown application server in java featuring service abstractions towards other application servers and so-called agents to be called by anything local (including widgets). I think, the naming of that platform results from a desire to use a buzz word only. Did anyone awaiting the widget foundation expect this to be delivered? I might be wrong, but I guess I am not the only one who expected something completely different, ie. a set of nice javascript libraries supporting rapid development of widgets communicating directly with SAP webservices - ooops - Enterprise Services.
-Ranting off -
anton
ps, looking into my crystal ball I see this change soon to come:
XI -> PI -> CI
why? 'Process' was the last main theme, now it seems to become 'Composition' like in CE and what could be better than to reflect this evolution in PI formerly known as XI too?
pps, what is The Love Symbol's or TAFKAP's actual stage name?
If Yusuf as an outsider to SAP says there is zero visibility, we have little choice but to agree. As an outsider it is his word that would matter more, in this regard.
Having established this problem here is a humble analysis. This is only in addition to what has already been said, to which i largely agree.
1. The biggest road block by far for me, is the lack of knowledge material on SAP products in the market. On the face of it, yes SDN has a huge archive of material, useful material also, but not really as comprehensive as is needed.
What is especially needed is a more exhaustive and higher quality documentation of functions and classes available in the development infrastructure.
SAP has an education division which has stratergized SAP education to be as expensive as possible (a BI training would cost over £10k in UK) and the circulation of education material as restricted as possible. Because of the proprietery nature of its technologies, there isnt much useful content available from third parties either, especially for the developers community.
Expensive education means lesser people being able to afford it and therefore a the existence of a closed community with little 'visibility' from outside. (note that this also translates into higher cost for SAP customers trying to hire SAP skills from a tight market pool)
The criteria of natural selection in SAP consulting became more often than not 'being able to afford it', instead of 'being intrinsicly good at it'. This is why we see a short fall of quality resources in this field.
SAP should stop being so greedy, and start facilitating consultant education instead of trying to earn exuberent profits through its education programs (as if its not earning enough already), This may drastically increase the SAP community size and would dramatically improve the 'visibility' that Yusuf was looking for.
2. Secondly, it is more expensive and complex to prepare an SAP webAS as compared to the general competition in the webAS market at least. (needs more resources so you need heavier machines). By componentizing netweaver in way that decouples the webAS from then BI and EP engines completely (note to some effect that is possible even now) SAP can bring down the footprint of a pure development environment.
An commendable effort on this front is already being made on the SDN, that provides the basic webAS as free downloads to the development community.
All said and done, I think that in due time we are bound to see a sharp incline in so called 'visibility' as SAP shifts its paradigm towards Java based environment and flood of Java developers starts entering the very lucrative field of SAP consulting.
This would inevitably start a spiral which would see a decrease in salaries of SAP development consultants, but hopefully an increase in the quality of work being done in general.
Ahsan,
I completely agree with your opinion on SAP education.
It is designed to keep the market small and expensive. It's good for my salary but, still, I can't agree.
Very often the teachers are external consultants whose first motivation is to get new customers. I've seen them, very often, keep information on the most difficult subjects or bugs workarounds to be able to sell them as consultants...
Now usually, I begin to work on the project inhouse before going to the formation.
Then, a few months later when I have had all the problems, I go to the formation and I can ask the real word questions....
Unluckilly, I don't always get answers !
Regards,
Olivier
hi Yusuf,
interesting question!
IMHO, one of the major reasons is the fact that SAP only pretends to be (is perceived to nly pretend to be) open and actually is still very self-centric.
Furthermore, as Gartner only recently analyzed it like
<i>
<b>Strengths</b>
Large and loyal application installed base creates huge up-sell opportunity for application infrastructure.
Strategic codevelopment of SAP applications with SAP Enterprise SOA makes SAP NetWeaver application infrastructure technology almost inevitable for SAP customers who develop and deploy next-generation composite business applications.
Rich SAP NetWeaver application platform suite (incorporating portal, composition and development tools), BPM, application integration and enterprise application server technology offer SAP customers a one-stop platform for SAP-centric heterogeneous applications.
Evolutionary 12- to 18-month vision for metadata management, process modeling and integration, ESB, event management and BAM.
<b>Cautions</b>
SAP's application infrastructure products are targeted first for SAP application customers and have limited appeal to non-SAP users.
Stand-alone SAP NetWeaver installed base is smaller than leading competitors' application infrastructure stacks.
In some areas (for example, ESB, BAM and event processing), SAP NetWeaver's current and planned feature set lags behind those of leading competitors by at least 12 to 18 months.
The relatively complex set of SAP NetWeaver technologies can be effectively used only by the most technically astute enterprise developers and IT operators.
</i>
I think this is a good quick summary.
<a href="http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/oracle/147519.html">Full article</a>.
The magic quadrant reflects your observation quiet well.
IMHO, SAP did a lot to position itself about 2 years ago but since then lost much momentum and is pretty quiet at the moment.
my 2 cents,
anton
Regards,
anton
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@ Yusuf Zaahir
Hey !!! Thanks for joining us ...did you get tired of hanging around on the Oracle forums! just kidding .....to answer your question, I will pass it to someone else. I don't know where to begin with the notion that NetWeaver is "just a development platform". There seems to be a big misunderstanding there, but I will let others try to explain it to you in better terms. You will come to find that we have no end of "cut-and-paste-experts" around here, and I would hate to deny them of their oooooo-sssoooooo-beloved "reward points" *! (haha)
*yes, I do realize this is the Coffee Corner...save it.
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