Hey Developers Worldwide – SAP Labs Israel is thinking about you….all the time

If Anatidaephobia is the fictional fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you (term invented by Gary Larson)……what is the feeling of being watch by Israeli SAP developers called ? Portaphobia ?….whatever it is, after the 2 days I have just spent at the SAP Labs Israel Meet the Customer / Partner Event – I have it. The good news is that it’s actually quite a pleasant feeling/

So why am I here ? It was my privilege to be asked to present my company’s views on the various tools that we have used from SAP (many of which were born in Israel). These include Enterprise Portal, Visual Composer (and VC5), Fiori Launchpad, SAP River Description Language (RDL) and SAP River Rapid Development Environment (RDE).

I have to admit that I was quite nervous putting together the material for the presentation I had to do, and even more nervous about the round table sessions…..learning that the presentation was to be given in the “Grill Room” didn’t calm me !!

However I should not have been concerned as everyone (and I mean everyone) was very welcoming and genuinely interested in our views on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that I presented. The questions I received were sharp and to the point – really trying to understand the root cause of my issues and concerns.

The round table discussions were even better with the allocated 1.5 hours shooting past.

The first session was about the Fiori Launchpad with the product owner outlining what the plans were for it and then digging into questions they had about how important certain new features were and how the roadmap might be received by customers / partners. The great news is that the Launchpad is coming to the Enterprise Portal (7.31 sp12 or 7.4 sp7 – already released), to native HANA XS and to the HANA Cloud Portal.

The second session was about the end to end developer experience with RDE and RDL being demo’d, showing how the 2 could complement each other, with business logic created in RDL and the SAPUI5 frontend being created using RDE. This session was packed with questions and discussions about the developer personas – what would they like ? what might they question ? how could the experience be made better ? Through all the questions, one thing came through to me – a passion to get great application development tools into the hands of as many developers as possible.

I can really recommend the experience – if you get an invite my advice would be to drop everything and go.