SAP NetWeaver OnDemand at TechEd

“Interesting times for developers to live in!”

Wow.. can’t believe it’s been a year ago since Vishal Sikka said the above to the audience of the SAP Innovation Weekend prior toImpressions from SAP TechEd 2010 Las Vegas last year. Time is flying…

For some reasons his statement just clicked with me ever since and I feel it perfectly summarizes the current state of the enterprise software space. There are plenty of new challenges/opportunities arising that may fundamentally impact the way software is developed and run in the future. For the sake of the poor kitties I refrain from calling it “game changers” – oops! – and then, the game is not changing really, just evolving.

As a software developer it seems obvious to me that the new dimensions certainly have impact on software architecture across all layers. On the data layer we see a shift from relational datastores to in-memory computing. With the adoption of HANA we see information processing move from the business logic layer downwards to the persistence layer. On the connectivity side we see that the world outside embraces RESTful services in addition to Web Service standards. And on the UX layer we see a variety of technologies at the moment, yet a common interest towards HTML5. Oh, and there’s also mobility. Here, it remains questionable whether customers are willing to pay additional development costs in order to run (nicely!) on all kind of  devices, so every application blueprint would be well-advised to support mobilizing an application. Last, but not least there’s the OnDemand topic… which from my perspective may be the biggest of them all. Sceptical? Hear me out then…

You’ve seen nothing yet!

When it comes to OnDemand SAP has been focusing on rolling out ByDesign and extending the OnPremise installed base with a counterpart in the cloud. The underling application platform of this OnDemand ERP offering is also the basis for all upcoming Line Of  Business (LoB) applications in the OnDemand space. So far so good… but, what you don’t know yet is that this is just beginning….

I say this, because so far we have only been talking about one specific capability of the SAP NetWeaver OnDemand platform – ABAP. There are more. Another one you may have heard of is River which provides form builder capabilities. And….. this year at SAP TechEd we will give you a sneak peak on the upcoming Java capabilities. 🙂

So, what do we got in store for you?

Strategy Track: [TEC103] “SAP Netweaver Java OnDemand – Overview and Roadmap”

• Description: The upcoming SAP NetWeaver OnDemand offering provides you with a compliant, secure, open source, and open standards-based platform that helps you to complement your existing SAP solutions with innovative on-demand applications without the need to care about operations and infrastructures. Join this session to learn more about this platform and to find out when it will be available.

• Format: 1 hour Lecture
• Las Vegas Speaker: Prasad Bhamidipati
• Bangalore Speaker: Prasad Bhamidipati
• Madrid Speaker: Thomas Bieser (Track Owner)
• Strategy Pod + Networking Sessions

Custom Development Track:[CD270] “How to develop an OnDemand Java application”

• Description: In this session you will develop a Java application on the new SAP NetWeaver OnDemand platform. Learn how to use the two most important platform services inside your application: Identity management Service for authentication and authorization, and Persistence Service to persist your business data.

• Format: 2 hour Hands On
• Las Vegas Speakers: Krasimir Semerdzhiev, Georgi Krounev
• Bangalore Speakers: Svetoslav Manolov, Jens Glander
• Madrid Speakers: Raphael Vogel (Track Owner), Timo Lakner
• Custom Development Pod + Networking Sessions

Custom Development Track: [CD111] “SAP NetWeaver OnDemand: Community-Centric Development”

• Description: In this session we would like to provide a preview on how to develop Java applications using the new SAP NetWeaver OnDemand platform. We will share lessons learned from first pilot projects and explain key architecture principles across all application layers based on a demo application. It targets Java developers interested in learning how to get started with developing on-demand solutions on the upcoming Java platform.

• Format: 1 hour Lecture
• Las Vegas Speakers: Matthias Steiner
• Bangalore Speakers: Reema Mittal
• Madrid Speakers: Matthias Steiner

Security, Compliance, Identity and Access Management  Track: [SCI209] “SAP Runs SAP: Experiences From the Implementation of Identity Management”

• Description: In this session you will learn how “SAP runs SAP” by using SAP NetWeaver Identity Management to consolidate millions of user accounts from multiple systems into a single repository. You will also see SAP NetWeaver Identity Management Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 identity provider is used to enable single sign-on (SSO) and single log-off (SLO) among those systems. The result is a change from the existing fragmented user experience to one that presents a unified “one SAP” on the Web. In the past, customers and partners had to create separate accounts for the different SAP Web sites: SAP.com, SAP Community Network, SAP StreamWork and so on. This is now changing with the introduction of the SAP Central Profile Service (accounts.sap.com). We will talk about the technology that makes this possible.

• Format: 1 hour Lecture
• Las Vegas Speakers: Paul Rostagno
• Bangalore Speakers: TBD
• Madrid Speakers: Darren Hague

I’ve been planning on creating a timetable for this track, yet my respected colleague Thomas has already done the needful, so I just needed to copy & paste it. Thanks for sharing!

 Las Vegas Schedule

As the Custom Developmnent Track Lead Karl Kessler already covered several of related sessions in his recent blog titled “Custom Development at TechEd 2011: Leverage your on premise and on demand development skills” I’ll skip that part and refer to his great overview of the whole track.

On a more personal note

Before I head off into my long awaited summer vacation let me finish with a quick outlook on my own session (shameless plug). Some of you may wonder what I mean by saying “community-centric development.” As you’ll soon find out the SAP NetWeaver OnDemand platform provides several capabilities such as ABAP, Java and others (sometimes referred to as “edge”.) As we try to reach out to as many developers as we can and have them develop app(lication)s for our platform, one of the fundamental guiding principles has been openness and ease of consumption. This is both true for the infrastructure aspects of it (IaaS) as well as the supporting programming models (PaaS). I don’t want to be the party-crasher and ruin our preview events at SAP TechEd so please understand that I’ll only scratch the surface at this point in time. Yet, let me tell you that much… from a developers point of you we have assembled  a great platform based on open-source standard libraries and frameworks such as Eclipse and Apache (among many others.) Same is true for the infrastructure and DevOps required to run and maintain the platform.

So, as you can see it’s all about open standards and open-source. About communities and developers. It’s that simple indeed: a platform is only as strong as its community. So, in a nutshell: I’d like to go sky-diving with you. We’ll start on a real high-level by looking at SAP’s Product Strategy in general and then discuss how the cloud fits into all of this. Then we pull the line (of the parachute) and slowly float down exploring how to develop OnDemand applications based on a concrete demo application. And then we touch ground – run the demo and scan the code. How does that sound?

So, if this sounds interesting to you – safe the dates! Looking forward to discussing this and related topics with our SCN community!

Related Sessions

• CD202, HTML5 for lightweight SAP Applications (Michael Falk, Andreas Kunz)
• TEC201, The SAP On-Demand Platform Strategy (Suresh Ramakrishnan)
• EIM114, Information Governance: Reducing Costs & Increase Customer Satisfaction (Chris Cingrani, Benjamin Wesson)

PS:

As we are approaching September I’m totally excited about having the chance of attending SAP TechEd Las Vegas again. WOW! As such I owe a sincere thank-you to my managers on all reporting lines for supporting me in this endeavor – Daniel, Olaf and Michael: thanks for your support!

As always, when thinking about developing a proof of concept on emerging technologies I team up with my colleagues from the Architecture and Technology Office within Custom Development. In regards to the demo app we feature in CD111 – the entire UI has been developed by Katharina Seiz again. It wouldn’t have been possible to take this all the way in this little time without your commitment and contributions. Why would I ever ask someone else? 😉 Thanks!!!

I feel very honored and privileged for the opportunity to be among the first to publicly talk about SAP NetWeaver OnDemand. As such, I’m very grateful for the trust and support I have received by Harald and his entire team. I’d like to give a special shout-out for the people safe-guiding me during my baby steps: Christian, Simon, Thomas, Raphael, Timo, Ed, Simeon, Krum, Peter, Pete, Jürgen and Nikolay. Last, but not a very special thanks to Marc to helping me at the very last mile – very much appreciated!

Having seen the enthusiasm and dedication of the team I’m pretty sure that … well, the sky is the limit! Kudos!