Why SAP ERP 6.0 EHP6 contains SAP BASIS 7.31

Hi Boris,

This is really useful

Regards

Arun

Perfect! Many thanks

congratulations for this information! very good explanation

what about the j2ee part? does it have the same 703 and 731 problem?

I do understand Boris's logic but I think there's another vision of what's going on with all the SAP versions and components progress! If you look at it from a Business  and

Technology perspectives you may have another logic.

SAP Marketing/Business Goals:

-Innovation: Keep the different Development Teams independent from each other so that Innovation in one team can move forward without having to wait for other teams.

-Internet/Standards: Rapid Adoption of new standards e.g SOA

-Business Needs: Organize the different Releases in such a way that Revenue and profit goals are  met and  kept predictable. For example, release 2 required products in 1 quarter and 3 in the next might show a steady profits growth to the investment community.

- Integration: Maximize Product Integration to keep customers buying SAP Products e.g  have the popularity of ERP induce customers to by SAP CRM , or SAP HCM , SCM, etc for better TCO.

-Etc, this persepective has Business goals and objectives as drivers.

Technology Prespective: Align the technology  with Business Goals.

-Organize the Software Engineering teams in such a way that each can go at its own speed as required by marketing. Thus Componentize the Software devlopment while keeping the Components Integration possible. This leads sometimes to irreconcilable results that's why we see glitches in the release logic sometimes.

To understand  the evolution one has to understand how SAP Systems and Apps work.

Initially in R/3, the Application Server (AS) was a Kernel (a bunch of Virtual Machines )Executing Apps written in ABAP and some ABAP components (SAP_BASIS and SAP_ABA) to manage ABAP to Kernel integration. The role of the AS is  to isolate the ABAP Apps from OS/Net, RDBMS dependencies and ensure Portability of those apps. However, since SAP had one Product R/3, so the AS and the ABAP Apps were "Tightly Coupled".

When SAP came up with New Dimensions products (BW, CRM, APO, ..) which are ABAP apps but couldn't run on the AS  of R/3 without tweeks.

-Fastforward to the Ecomerce era after Y2K. SAP needed to focus on Integration and Internet Standards for EC/eBusiness. So they "Decoupled " the Apps from the A.S , Added ICM for HTTP(s) at kernel level to support Internet standards, and added J2EE Engine to support Non-SAP to SAP Integration. This started the independence of the AS releases from the Application Releases. Thus we had new AS releases 6.10, 6.20, 6.30, 6.40, 7.0

while R/3 moved through releases 4.7 then ECC5, ECC 6.0. Likewise CRM, SCM,etc.

One major decision was: How to make the A.S completely independent from the ABAP Application?  Even before, the O.S level kernel of the AS was the same for  all the APPs because they all used WorkProcesses (ABAP Virtual Machines) to execute the APPS. However, the SAP_BASIS, SAP_ABA couldn't support BW/BI for example.

So SAP made the component SAP_BW (BW Engine without content), and other ones like the Plug_ins for ETL, standard part the AS. This  made the AS able to run and integrate with any ABAP based application.

At this point then, all the development of the AS technology has to do is be backward compatible!

The above resolves the Goals of independent development teams each Innovating at its own speed while unifying the runtime Platform (AS) for all the appliactions!

What if the PI team creates an Innovation (driven by Market needs) for which the AS release is not ready? Easy, the AS Development team creates a bunch of SPs, or new AS release,  to make the new PI release runnable!

Keep in mind that we are looking at the latest AS 7.4 SR1 but the AS Dev team at SAP are already working on AS 8.x and 9.x! AS 7.4 is just what's released to custmers!

Besides the major Innovation of decoupling APPs from AppServer and Java Support, SAP made ABAP Object Oriented, HTTP Based Applications Support (BSPs and WDs), started a movement to SOA, introduced the concept of continous Upgrades (EHPs), created the Netweaver stack with 4 levels of Integration using Web/Enterprise Services where the A.S is the platform Intgration Layer because it supports all the APPs (the other layers are PI, BI, EP). Notice that SAP Application Server naming (branding) has been changing based on what SAP Marketing wanted to emphasize to the Market! (App Server, Web AS cause of Internet Support, then Netweaver to emphasize SOA Integration, guess the next name?)

Notice also  that at Business level, SAP has only 2 main branding levels Netweaver for SOA Based Integration and Business Suite for Business Process innovations! These translate into 1000s of Software componennts that the SLD and the LMDB have to keep harmonized!

Each of these Innovations and the teams working on them move at differnt speeds with different requirements to responds to the Business needs of higher revenues and profits. It's Wall street that's driving and creating the mess for all of us Techies down here!

So what happen, when SAP Merketing annouces that ECC will be available on Hana at date XYZ? Well, the developers of ECC scramble to get rid of all those internal tables and the  SQL statments have to be adapted to take advantage of Hana features, architecture. The NW AS development team have to make sure that the new ECC re-writes and the Hana client libs, and soforh are accomodated! How do they make that happen? Well, each team writes what they can, create the EHP and the SPS they need for their product to work with the other teams products inorder to deliver a Working ECC + AS on Hana. If they did major changes they might brand it as a new release

for example NW AS 7.0 + EHP3+SPSx= AS 7.3 SPz, etc. What happen to us as a result? Well we scramble to make sense of it all but beyond that to make it work for our customers!

Bottom line is that there's an overarching logic to the maddness but the devil is ib the details! So keep going and while enjoying the ride!

Atman N.