Inspite of working with several open source technologies, .NET stack, mobile stack for several years, SAP had been a mysterious black box for a long time. Five years back I finally got a chance to work in a number of applications using SAP at the backend. I got introduced to the SAP world; ABAP, BAPI, ECC, EBP, R3, BI, BW, DSO etc., These terms and jargons can drive you nuts if you are from the Java/.NET/RoR world.
Last week I visited SAP HQ in Germany for understanding the future of SAP, Hana on the Cloud. HCP( or Hana Cloud Platform) is the latest(!!!) offering from SAP. Sensing the future being cloud, they have unified all their services and created a complete stack on the cloud.
Now, what’s interesting to the whole bunch of audience in the programming, non-SAP world is it’s easy to get into SAP Hana now. They talk our terms; Here’s is some of the things that I as an application developer have understood about SAP.
- ABAP is history. It’s going to be (or already) a bad news for lot of ABAP developers. SAP Hana is moving it out slowly. Though the core libraries are still ABAP, it’s imperative for the guys to move to Java world.
- No support for .NET. That’s really not a surprise.
- You can develop Java and HTML5(with JS) applications and deploy it in HCP.
- RoR, Node JS and Scala support is on the way
- Monolithic application development is slowly fading away in the cloud. It’s time for multiple little services floating in the cloud.
- The In-Memory Column database Hana DB, brings in the speed for analytics. This is my favorite.
- IoT (Internet of Things) seems to be the fancy kid of SAP world. The roadmap has a number of things moving towards bringing in support for IoT
- A number of functional business-oriented applications like SuccessFactors, Ariba, C4C, Concur etc., have been acquired by SAP and moved to the cloud.
- SAP applications on the mobile with devices management mechanisms is a key player.
- There’s no support for elasticity like AWS
- It’s bloody expensive right now!!!
We need to wait and see what lies ahead of SAP Hana on the Cloud. But definitely interesting for an application developer like me.
Of all the snaps, I clicked during my visit, the following was the most interesting 
