
DSAG Technology Days 2023
What is the latest news from the world of SAP technology? In this article we take a look behind the two days and what is new.
Table of contents
This year the Technology Days were in Mannheim and there was again a lot of new things to admire. In this article, we will cover the keynote and some important topics. Also what's new from the DSAG and the members.
Keynote
The keynote was divided into three parts, we now want to go into these three parts in more detail and briefly summarize the content for you.
DSAG
The keynote and the main topic of the technology days were a well-kept secret until the end. The topic "work in progress" is primarily intended to make it clear that SAP is still in the middle of work and also still has many TODOs for customers. Solutions such as PI/PO or the Solution Manager have already been given an expiry date (2027), but SAP has not yet presented a successor solution. SAP Cloud ALM is advertised for the Solution Manager, but the change management part alone will only be addressed in 2023/24. This means that customers are currently faced with the challenge of jumping onto the project at an early stage. SAP also has to give customers the time to move and migrate their landscapes.
The sometimes strange discount models of SAP were criticized. In some cases, customers are offered discounts on cloud solutions of 80% in contrast to the list price. This raises the question of why the list prices are so high and why the costs sometimes just don't add up in the projects. Furthermore, the annual increase of 3.3% comes on the costs sold among other things with innovation. The only question then is where the innovation is in discontinued services.
Again, the strategy was praised on the topic of SAP Datasphere and how the product will support the area of analytics in the future. SAP Datasphere is the new name for the old solutions Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC), Data Intelligence and other products.
SAP
At SAP, the main focus was on the business technology platform and how it can support the ERP (public cloud, private cloud, on-premise) in order to create new value with in-house developments. The various product portfolios in the areas of:
- App Development
- Automation
- Integration
- Data and Analytics
- AI
Rezo
Rezo was invited as a guest speaker, who once again gave an insight into the topic of social media and the acquisition of young influencers. The group of young people will become particularly important later on, when young talent is sought in the area of SAP development. Among other things, he presents his start-up Nindo, which works on the evaluation of social media activities.
ABAP Cloud & RAP
As always, there was also some news from the RAP world. You could already follow some of what the colleagues from SAP presented in the blog posts from SAP. The RAP interfaces or RAP facades were explained again. This allows RAP objects to be expanded without modification and thus contributes to Clean Core. New are the side effects with which you can update data fields on the UI without reloading. Also new is the event integration for consuming or creating events for an event broker (event mesh, event grid).
Furthermore, there was an outlook on the future features of RAP, such as local system events, easy control of workflows, etc.
SAP has thus completed the first two blocks of the programming model and applications can be built with RAP, and the data model can also be expanded. The last point is still being worked on.
ABAP Cloud means the entire new programming model based on "ABAP Development for Cloud", whether in the ABAP Environment, in the S/4 Cloud or an S/4 HANA On-Premise. If you follow the guidelines then you stay Clean Core and this makes the architecture of custom developments in the on-premise system easier.
BTP at SAP
How does SAP actually operate its own BTP platform, how are the services used and what does SAP actually do with them? These questions were clarified in the SAP presentation. The account structure was discussed, how responsibilities are regulated and how governance works. SAP is currently using the BTP primarily for the implementation of extensions to the SAP systems (employee apps, feedback plugin), just as customers should actually do. Above all, the BTP is intended to drive its own innovations.
Event Mesh
Event-driven architecture will gain in importance over the next few years, as it increases the stability of IT infrastructure and reduces dependency on system availability. Independent chains can also be created, all of which can react to central events. There are currently two types of events:
- Notification Event - Small event that only contains the necessary information and usually requires a synchronous API call afterwards.
- Data Event - Large event, which usually contains complete data packages. No API call needs to be made afterwards.
At the same time, the Advanced Event Mesh was presented, which primarily takes care of the distribution of events in large networks. For example, if the events are not consumed in a broker, they are not transmitted there either, which reduces the load on the network.
ADT Guideline
The new guide to ABAP Development Tools has now been published and explains best practices when using the plugin. The document also focuses on installation, use and troubleshooting and supplements the public information from SAP. The main focus is on the use and advantages of ADTs. There are three variants of the guide:
You can also actively help shape the guide, report bugs and make adjustments to chapters via the GitHub repository. This makes the guide a living document and is continuously updated.
Conclusion
The two days were again full of news and interesting things about SAP. But we also want to particularly emphasize the new guide on the subject of ADT, which everyone should be dealing with by now. The ABAP development tools are the future of ABAP development and those who are still using the SE80 will find it much more difficult to switch later.