DSAG Technology Days 2024 & TechXchange
The Technology Days in Hamburg are over, let's take a look back and look at the new TechXchange format in detail.
Table of contents
This year, in addition to the Technology Days, there is also a new DSAG format, the TechXchange. In this article we look at the last three days in detail and report on what happened in the ABAP development area and what there was to see.
Keynotes
As with every event, it started with the keynotes from DSAG and SAP. The demands on SAP were again made known by DSAG.
DSAG
The topic “From Vision to Reality” was about opening the “black box”. There have been many announcements and prototypes from SAP in recent years, but which ones will be available to customers? The question also arose again, will these innovations also be available to on-premise and non-RISE customers in the future? These questions need to be clarified over the next few years and better roadmaps and concrete goals are created.
In the area of integration, the “Edge Integration Cell” was delivered, which enables clean communication in the on-premise landscape without having to go via the cloud. This is a positive step for the customer and opens up further options when integrating SAP systems.
The next question was AI: what kind of innovations will SAP deliver that customers can sensibly implement into their processes and that also deliver added value? AI was the hype topic last year, which led to a multiplication of investments in this area. AI can already help in many areas to relieve work or carry out simple tests reliably.
SAP
One of the most exciting statements from CTO Jürgen Müller that day was: "Customers voted with their feet that AI solutions are only offered in the cloud, since 9x% of users are cloud customers." Based on the audience's reaction, not all customers felt engaged. However, there were also positive reports, such as that the issue of security had been addressed and that the security dashboard would soon be rolled out as a template in the SAC (SAP Analytics Cloud). This was a long-standing wish from the community to finally make the topic of security much more transparent.
Furthermore, Joule is currently being significantly expanded and expanded with connections to Success Factors and Concur, so that HR services and travel scenarios can be mapped via chat. A demo was shown on how to plan a trip, book a hotel and flight, and also submit a vacation application to extend the trip. The demo looked pretty good so far, but how will Joule prove itself in practice?
In the area of IDM (Identity Management), there will be no successor solution from SAP, but there will be a clean integration of Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure AD. Customers can also use their own solutions. Here the SAP portfolio will become somewhat leaner and make room for partner solutions.
The SAP Datasphere solution will have additional connectors for Success Factors and S/4 HANA to make it easier to connect the surrounding system and to provide additional standardized data sources for evaluation.
A new product was announced, the Business Transformation Suite, which provides Cloud ALM, Signavio and Lean IX and tightly integrates them to bring the best of all three worlds to the customer and better integrate the solutions into the SAP ecosystem .
There was another announcement that was supposed to provide relief, but negative questions were already beginning to arise in the community. In the future, Adobe Document Services (ADS) will run via the SAP HANA XSA Runtime in order to provide simple on-premise scenarios for creating documents. However, the technology and maintenance of XSA requires a lot of effort and is not so easy for customers to implement. It remains to be seen whether it was the right decision or whether it should also run in a Docker container.
Special Guest
This year's special guest was Micha Fritz, the founder of "Viva con Agua", which campaigns for clean drinking water for everyone, as it is actually a basic need and should always remain free. After the company's presentation, it was about sustainability and how companies can rethink to be more sustainable. Nowadays, data centers are mostly operated with drinking water, although industrial water would actually be sufficient as it is only used to dissipate heat.
Talks
There was a lot to see at the lectures, this year we were mainly in the area of AK Development and heard various lectures on different topics. There were also various sessions on the topic of ABAP Cloud, first an influencing session and later a TechTalk with insights into the topic.
Spar ICS
The Spar colleagues reported on their S/4 migration journey and provided exciting insights into how they dealt with the issue of green and bluefield in order to ultimately create the optimal solution. Above all, emphasis was placed on an efficient solution and not just relying entirely on modern technologies. The focus was on the developer and his skills and where the journey actually takes his colleagues. In the end, technical debt was incurred, but the system was transformed in time.
Tchibo
How did Tchibo actually deal with the BTP issue? Here there was insight into building a central team with permissions, base and development and not a central team for the BTP, like other companies do. With this centralized approach, it was possible to make specific services and catalogs available to the customer and optimally adapt them to their needs.
Lufthansa
The colleagues from Lufthansa were on stage together with SAP and showed insights into the Fiori Elements process and how SAP's showcase app helps them to present the possibilities to the customer. The main approach chosen here was to implement many things with Fiori Elements and to let the department use the standard first before implementing expensive in-house developments. SAP presented new features, such as the changeable tree views or the Collaborative Draft, where several people can work on one draft instance.
rku
The rku addressed the topic of version control and provided insights into the topic of classic version management with SAP, local history in the ABAP development tools, abapGit and gCTS. gCTS is the transport management with git, which is also used as a standard in the ABAP Environment. Basically, Git has made its way into the SAP world and is used for projects, but also the standard.
TechXchange
The TechXchange is the new DSAG format and compresses the TechEd topics into one day. The format is aimed primarily at the developer community in Europe and in the future more and more topics and lectures are planned in English in order to reach a wider audience. This year there was still a lot of content in German, probably because the format is still quite young and was no longer possible in the short preparation time. There were different formats aimed at different target groups, such as simple lectures, technical lectures where you got to see a lot of code, and hands-on sessions where you could also develop yourself.
The event was divided into the various streams for SAP, Microsoft, IBM, AWS, the various working groups, but also consultation hours in the technical working groups. ABAP Cloud was once again the focus of SAP to once again underline the importance of the topic. Overall, the Hyperscaler sessions were not that well attended, probably because there were too many good SAP topics.
Interesting topics were:
- ABAP Cloud - There were again insights into the theory and structure of the development model and the 3-TIER model.
- Clean Code - Overview of the clean code topics with the ABAP style guide (Clean ABAP), Code pal as an extension of the ATC and the ABAP Cleaner as an extension of the ADTs.
- RAP experience report - insights into a project with a lot of legacy code and an old model. The structure of the CDS stack was described here, the problems with the views and performance, as well as the challenges in building the RAP objects.
Conclusion
The Technology Days are always very informative when it comes to current SAP developments and a look into the future. The new format of the TechXchange reinforces the days full of slides with development-related content, where you get another look at the technology and implementation. Basically, the exchange in the community is an important part of the days and shows a new look at the topics of other companies.
