Are You There, SAP? It’s Us, Developers

[Jelena_Perfiljeva]

Folks,

Several years and executive shuffles ago, we heard a strategic message from SAP: developers are kind of important. It manifested itself in a variety of ways: the keynotes where the charismatic former CTO was coding live on stage, special developer passes to TechEd, the creation of Developer space on sap.com, ABAP development trial becoming widely available, etc.

The advancements in Cloud infrastructure, open source development transforming from quaint grassroots movement into mainstream, and necessity to utilize other languages than ABAP (gasp!) created the “perfect storm” not only to shake-up the SAP development world but for many other developers to enter SAP ecosystem. Heck, even to me the idea of creating the Angry Birds equivalent of the enterprise world in Cloud and then retiring early seems very appealing.

The first step for the potential SAP Angry Birds creator would be to learn and start using SAP Cloud Platform (SCP). For that, they could use free 30-day trial account that can be later extended 2 more times to 90 days total. This appears very generous of SAP but only until we look at how it actually works and how it compares to the competition.

Fellow SAP Mentor Alum tobias.hofmann explained the issue with SCP trial very well in his recent blog post. I encourage everyone to read it in its entirety but my TLDR version is: after 90 days, your development gets deleted; the trial account is a “dead end” that does not easily extend to the paid tier.

By comparison, the providers like Amazon, Oracle, and even IBM offer a free tier of their services. Unlike a trial account, free tier (a) never expires, meaning you don’t have to worry about the trial counter ticking; (b) if your SAP Angry Birds app takes off, you can easily expand to the paid tier or even just add additional paid services a la carte.

What Do Others Offer?

After reading Tobias’s blog, I went to investigate the free tier offerings. By using Google with “<name> free tier”, I found the corresponding web pages for Amazon AWS, Oracle, and IBM Cloud very easily. The information checked out: all free tiers were not limited by time and easily upgradeable with paid services or higher, paid tiers, if necessary.

Since IBM already has my personal information anyway, I went all the way and registered a Lite (free tier) account there. For a company that is casually criticized for being slow and old-fashioned, I have to say it was unexpectedly simple and easy process. I entered my name and email address, received a confirmation email, and in less than a minute had this:

Oracle was a bit more needy, wanting my cell phone and, for some reason, payment information upfront. Amazon required only email and phone for personal account.

What do we get from SAP? Top link in Google search is a 9-step tutorial that, among other steps, includes registration of 2 separate accounts and “Understand trial counter” step.

Sorry to say but it is embarrassing.

What’s The Big Deal?

One might say, “but you can just keep extending the trial over and over, so what’s the big deal?” Well, if it’s so easy to extend the trial perpetually then why does it even exist? Why is it not a permanent free tier? Why do the developers have to deal with the risk of losing their work? I’ve been an SAP developer for 15 years and I have no plans to leave. Relationship with SAP is not a “trial” of anything for me. It's discouraging to see SAP having commitment issues when it comes to our partnership .

Also, the nature of “trial” suggests that it’s “try before you buy” option for someone who is interested in purchasing full product but is unsure about decision. If this is the goal of SAP SCP trial account, then, as Tobias points out in his blog, it is not actually set up like that.

History Lesson

While randomly browsing Reddit, I stumbled upon animated infographics showing how the mobile OS market share changed over time. It caught my attention that Symbian, the name I haven’t even heard before, once held almost 40% market share and then quickly faded into oblivion. I went to read more about it out of curiosity. This OS was used by Nokia and Sony Ericson phones that also practically disappeared for a variety of reasons, but this passage on Wikipedia sounded chillingly familiar:

"Despite its sizable market share then, Symbian was at various stages difficult to develop for: First [...] due to the complexity of then the only native programming languages [...]; then the obstinate developer bureaucracy, along with high prices of various IDEs and SDKs, which were prohibitive for independent or very small developers; and then the subsequent fragmentation[...]. All of this discouraged third-party developers, and served to cause the native app ecosystem for Symbian not to evolve to a scale later reached by Apple's App Store or Android's Google Play."

Without the applications, without the support from the wide developer community, SAP platform is destined to become Symbian of the enterprise software world. If SAP is indeed serious about the developer relationships, it is time to commit and “put a ring on it” with not a trial but a permanent free tier of the Cloud Platform.

P.S. Related reading / viewing / listening:
Diginomica article Why SAP Developers Can't Have Nice Things by dahowlett
LinkedIn discussion
Twitter discussion
Live conversation with Dennis and matt.steiner on YouTube
Coffee Corner radio podcast with Matthias, Tobias, and 68fdcfd7801242baafce4e6cd1b5d218

[Former Member]

Are You There, SAP? It’s Us, Developers

I understand the free trial that you are advocating for- good we all need that too, but I thought you wrote on behalf of all developers that include folks like us who care about the IDE. Can we access SAP ABAP PaaS w/o IDE- NO. I am using Eclipse ADT and it's not polished, I don't like ADT it's slow, it lacks many features when I am doing my S/4 developments I have to many times switch back to GUI

Has SAP settled down on a single programming model path? Or is it RAP and Steampunk today and something else tomorrow and again they will say we don’t know if it will be the natural successor, we are working to protect your investments. Given such stupid SAP comments, customers and developers stick to old ways.

Up skilling is not always the issue, I personally worked on BOPF, ODATA, etc. and I don't care about Fiori I don't want to be full stack so some UI annotations sometimes was okay what is the new model offering something similar in a more refined way with behavior definitions, etc. but what about those customers who are evaluating today- the earliest RAP getsmass adopted will be at least 5 years from now if RAP is still alive then. And for all that late adoption it's SAP who are to be blamed.

Make the language powerful, create powerful tools and let developers decide than forcing down a CDS flavored do it all paradigm sprinkled with some black magic of "annotations".

Thanks,

[Jelena_Perfiljeva]

Yes, this blog is written on behalf of all the developers (taking some liberties here, obviously 🙂 ). But it focuses on a single specific issue: free tier for SCP.

If there is one thing I learned in all this years pleading with SAP for some positive changes it's you have to raise one subject at a time. If you go all-in like "IDE-sucks-and-how-many-do-we-need-and-stop-making-new-ABAP-models-and-I-don't-like-CDS" then you will not get any of this solved.

There is nothing preventing anyone else from advocating for any other causes though. It's not like I have a monopoly. 🙂 But if anyone attempts that, I suggest to focus on one issue that can be clearly formulated.

Thank you.

[zfiori]

Hi Community,

" Also, the nature of “trial” suggests that it’s “try before you buy” option for someone who is interested in purchasing full product but is unsure about decision. If this is the goal of SAP SCP trial account, then, as Tobias points out in his blog, it is not actually set up like that. " 

Thanks for your selfless sharing, it really help us a lot.

🙂

Regards,

ZFiori.