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arunmaarirajha
Explorer
532

Introduction

11 years ago, when I began my career as an SAP Integration consultant, often times when I google for work related research, I’d see results from SAP SCN and SAP help pages only. Today, what has changed is that, I see results on the same question/theme, being addressed by blogs/sites that have nothing to do with the SAP tool/platform on which, I am working currently. But the answer/content that I read there somehow turns out to be highly relevant to the issue/topic I am researching currently, on the SAP tool/platform that I am working with.

Upon reflection, as a broader trend across various SAP products and platforms, there seem to be a strong adoption of industry standard technologies, protocols & frameworks, which in many cases are open-source as well. While SAP’s proprietary standards have influenced others in the ERP industry for a long time, this remarkable departure and SAP gravitating towards standards in many aspects, is something that prompted me to connect the dots and to share with the community. In this post, I’d like to list a few of the areas, where I have noticed this trend:

1) Integrations:

  • REST, ODATA APIs encouraged instead of bapi/rfc, proxy, Idoc
  • Edge Integration Cell is based on Kubernetes containers, which is industry standard to package & distribute workloads, a necessary evolution from the SOA style platform that SAP PI/PO used to be.
  • Well documented APIs in Business Accelerator Hub than in PI/PO days
  • SAP Cloud Integration being based on Apache camel open-source framework. By extension, this facilitates direct support for camel expression language as well as various enterprise integration patterns – like splitter, router, gather, join in the Iflow design.
  • Integration advisor’s crowdsourced ML based mapping recommendation, supports conversion of canonical data model to standard EDI formats like ANSI X12, EDIFACT and vice-versa.

2) Platform choices:

  • Choice of hyperscaler platforms – Azure, AWS, etc. allowed to be exercised by the customer. This makes SAP an ERP Software selling company.
  • Runtime environments such as Cloud Foundry & Kyma are open-source. (Further reading)

3) Application Development:

  • Support for Java, JavaScript (node js), in addition to ABAP as tech stacks. This is a big step in utilizing coding skills available in the market.
  • BAS and Build Code being Git friendly.

4) Broader BTP services:

  • Application logging service in BTP uses Kibana (an open-source project)
  • KServe, an open-source Model Inference Platform on Kubernetes, being used behind the scenes by AI Core.
  • Redis & Postgres hyperscaler offering in addition to the proprietary HANA DB.
  • Evolution of UX/UI from proprietary SAP GUI to Fiori / UI5 based front-end. OpenUI5 is a JavaScript UI Framework released by SAP under the Apache 2.0 license.

Conclusion

SAP’s growing adoption of open-source technologies and industry standards doesn’t just seem to be accidental, but based on a conscious vision, as reflected in the SAP Open-source Manifesto. This shift benefits both customers and developers by fostering interoperability, flexibility, and innovation in the SAP ecosystem.

Disclaimer: My observations are based on my exposure to SAP BTP & ERP only and this trend might not apply or apply differently across SAP’s other product lines.

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