Sitting here with a big bowl of soup and a sore throat, I ponder upon the past week at Sap TechEd. It's been, as always, an interesting experience which leaves me with a lot of food for thoughts. There was a definite focus on 3 main topics:
- SAP HANA
- Mobility
- Cloud
This is absolutely not unexpected, because these three topics have been dominating the entire SDN community for the past year. Let's take a look at each of them and highlight the key take-aways from the event.
SAP HANA
HANA (In-Memory computing) has been a hot topic for 2 years already actually. Back in 2009, the keynote at TechEd Vienna was all about the bottleneck in speed, which the hard disk proved to be. Now, 2 years later, I'm happy to report that this bottleneck has finally been tackled, and we can now read data directly from the memory. This means a huge performance improvement on data heavy operations. Even up to 100.000 times faster!
This sounds incredible, but let's not forget what is at the base of this performance increase. In order to boost performance, you need to start from a situation where performance is lacking. In all cases, the reason for poor performance was the sheer amount of data to be processed and the ineffective way in which the programs tried to process it.
I've seen examples in my consulting days, of programs that ran for multiple days, to process a rather large dataset. After tweaking these reports with proper design principles however, we managed to reduce the runtime to less than 2 hours. This also sounds magical and was achieved without using HANA, but by simply using proper design principles.
I'm not saying that HANA is not a huge leap, because it is. The thing that bothers me however, is the fact that HANA promises to bring a performance increase out-of -the box which is far greater than can be achieved by refactoring. That's a statement I don't like. It means that systems run in danger of getting cluttered with poor code and future developers, no longer faced with performance issues, will implement rubbish in systems.
HANA might eventually lead to lazy developers. This is me being paranoid here, because it is truly an amazing technology which I can't wait to put in practice, using proper design principles and still using my good old binary read.
Mobility
If you have read any of my previous blogs, checked my LinkedIn profile or read some of my tweets, You should know by now that I'm a mobile technology adept. This was caused by a rather random encounter at TechEd Vienna back in 2009 and was certainly not the case before this encounter.
It doesn't seem that long ago, but boy, has this technology matured in those 2 years! Out of 10 people on the floor, 8 of them had a tablet device (apart from my own Galaxy Tab, they were all iPads). Those without a tablet device felt inadequate. (quote from an ex-colleague of mine)
From a technological perspective, I saw a real maturity on mobility. Nearly everybody knows what a MEAP is and how it works. They all understand the principle of synchronization and offline storage and they all understand that one-size, does not fit all.
Accross the border at SAPHireNow, I heard a very different sound... There, they were still informing business oriented attendees on what mobility is, and what it is not. Apparently, many still fear/hope that it's some sort of mobile SAPGui. The single greatest fear there, is that mobile technology is not mature enough for enterprises.
This ofcourse is not true, rather the opposite. Enterprises are not ready for mobility, because it demands a certain openness and trust in your IT and staff. It demands a confidence in innovation and new technology.
A lot of this fear is actually being fed by a vicious circle of misinformation. Business presents to business. How can they ever bring accross a correct message if they misunderstood the message themselves. I actually heard one presenter describe his mobile project like a "Ford Model T". To him, this may have seen like a compliment, because the Model T meant a huge leap in automotive industry. He couldn't have chosen a worse metaphor. Half of the audience now thought that Mobility was not a mature technology, just like the Ford was merely the start of a new decade. The other half understood that his project resembled an antiquated slow and uncomfortable ride.
Key message here is: Mobility must be an IT driven project, not a business driven project. I'm sorry, but we have the knowledge of it, let it up to us to solve your functional needs with the proper technology.
Cloud Technologies
This last hot topic suffers from very much the same problems as Mobility. Cloud technologies are actually quite mature, but busines still seems very much uninformed on the advantages and possibilities. Most heared objections are: "Our data is somewhere out there!", "What about security?", "What about my personell?".
Do you as a CEO know where your data is stored now? No, but surely your IT staff will be able to tell you, if you find the right person to talk to. Cloud is no different, they embark in a service contract with you. You want to know where your data is? Ask them, they'll be able to answer you.
All your internal IT systems are locked away in your highly secured private network. No different with cloud. the systems are also in your secured private network. Only physically, they are somewhere else. But does it really matter if they are in a bunker in the USA or in a bunker in your backyard?
Your personnel manages your systems now, mostly without actually touching the hardware. This won't change in the cloud. Your own personnel will still maintain the systems, only the hardware is no longer your concern. It's a matter of letting experts focus on what they're good at, so you don't have to find new experts on the job market.
Varia
There were many more topics which weren't quite as hot. One in particular was NetWeaver Gateway. to me, it's closely related to mobilty, but I did see some things which I want to highlight here. SAP promotes Gateway as the module which allows access to your backend data via REST and OData. SOAP was too complex and heavy for some lightweight applications, so they implemented a REST/Odata provider instead.
Being SAP, they obviously needed to add some more information in the OData syntax in order to get some metadata accross. Much like WSDL's for SOAP... Take a lightweight protocol, add unnecessary data to it, put it in a separate module which adds extra overhead. I'm not sure if it's actually going to be faster and easier than SOAP.
Oh and as an extra, Gateway allows to generate REST based services from Screen Scraping. Yep that's right, we're going back to "Batch input". Oh dear...
So if you, as a developer, ever think of using a lightweight protocol instead of SOAP, please read thisRESTful webservices in ABAP using a generic controller
On a final note I would like to say that this blog would probably not have existed without the relentless airconditioning in the Airplane, Hotel and IFEMA, giving me my sore throat and keeping me indoors. But I'm not complaining, because I most definitely needed some rest anyway 🙂
I've seen a lot of progress in technology and education and met a lot of enthusiasts who share my vision and passion.
I can't wait to see what next year brings!
ps: find original version of my blog here
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