The addiction to the R/3, mySAP ERP and ABAP is a hard one to fight. SAP professionals have developed a strong and addictive relationship with the ABAP platform from the past several decades. A huge service industry has spun off the ABAP platform and most Enterprise organizations run their core business processes on SAP R/3. When Matt Danielsson, SearchSAP Editor, raised the question “Are Abapers doomed?” ( http://searchsap.blog-city.com/are_abapers_doomed.htm?asrc=EM_USC_614574&uid=5551116), he touched on a very fundamental question for all SAP professionals, business and technology alike. How can you be doomed when so much success has been generated from ABAP. Why am I doomed when I can software enable any business requirements using the Abap platform and the technology components that is offered with it? With the help of the SAP customizing/IMG, BAPIs, Workflow, etc…, I can do everything the business is asking me for. The problem is not with the ABAP Platform. It’s the most powerful business application development platform in the market after all. The problem is elsewhere. It’s the globalization, the consolidation, the competition, the outsourcing, the legislation, the internet… It’s the ever changing and fast paced world we live in. It’s the Big Four consultancy companies in India accelerating the commoditization of software development and on a collision course with the Big Four in the US and Europe trying to preserve their high-value business consultancy premiums. It’s the customers who want to get more return out of their IT dollars. It’s the SOA paradigm that opens the door to model-driven composition versus custom development. In this world, the ABAP platform is simply not the best application platform to address the kind of business processes needed to support today’s business reality. SAP calls them “innovative business processes” as opposed to core transactional processes. The assumption is that most Enterprise organizations have software enabled most of their core processes using SAP products but not their innovative processes yet (the ones that make them unique or competitive). That’s when the SAP enterprise SOA vision comes into picture. That’s when Netweaver platform comes into picture. That’s when the BPX role comes into picture. Netweaver is SAP enterprise SOA platform and will be destined to the same success in the world of innovative business processes as the ABAP platform was to the core processes. Yes, Netweaver is not just a platform for SAP techies. It’s for SAP funkies too. Yes there’s life for Business Analysts within Netweaver beyond their beloved transaction code SPRO. It comes in the form of the composition technologies of Netweaver (Visual Composer for UI and Analytics, Guided Procedures for Process Layer, Composite Application Framework for Service Layer, etc…). So how does that make it a matter of survival? Embracing Netweaver is just a natural step moving forward for people and organizations who want to embrace the future and avoid getting trapped into the past. Going against it, it’s as awkward as a Christian who lives only by the “Old Testament” without “the New Testament” or the Star Wars without “Return of the Jeidi”. (Huh?)
