Teched Barcelona started with an amazing keynote. Thanks to Björn Goerke. Totally different from last year, it was very technical and completely in the star trek theme! During the keynote, SAP showed very technical demos of different technologies. Very risky but everything went well, so thumbs up! Hope to see similar keynote next year!

Even Björn must do the laundry ????

SAP Leonardo

I went to Teched to find out more about Leonardo and all the technologies behind it. Therefore, I followed sessions of Machine Learning, Blockchain and IoT. The IoT service was already introduced last year but blockchain and machine learning are very new and hot!

Blockchain

SAP offers a blockchain service on top of the SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry Environment. This will make it easy for customers to create blockchain nodes, connect these nodes and create a private blockchain network, also called Consortium. It will enable customers to start their own Blockchain network or extend your existing one, not all nodes have to run on SCP to connect them. The Blockchain service contains:

• Provisioning of a Hyperledger Network Node
• Blockchain Cockpit
• Blockchain Explorer
• Chain Code Deployment and Invocation via REST API
• Secure Store for Blockchain Certificates and Keys

This Blockchain service in SCP doesn’t mean you must start with Blockchain. It’s very hard to find a useful Blockchain scenario! Just remember: SAP will release this soon and you could use it if you really need it!

Machine Learning

I’ve been playing around with the “old” IoT service on SCP and I wanted to know how I could enrich these IoT projects with Machine Learning, so I followed a hands-on session. During this session we activated Machine Learning in SCP Cloud Foundry and uploaded a model. We had to do everything from command line. As a developer, I like to use the command line, but you just know that this will change and be adapted into the SCP Cockpit. The model was already prepared and we didn’t change it. (The customizing and training part of the model was not included in the hands-on.) For creating your own model, you’ll probably need another service like analytics but this will not be created in the Machine Learning service.

For this Machine Learning service, SAP added Kubernetes to the SAP Cloud Platform. Kubernetes is another Cloud technology that SAP adopted in the SAP Cloud Platform next to the NEO and Cloud Foundry environment. In this hands-on we used python to create a proxy between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. I guess this will also change.

We can say that SAP Cloud Platform has a Machine Learning service but it’s far from finished. If you really need it, you can start using it but it will change a lot the coming months, years, …

ABAP in the Cloud

The biggest new thing on Teched, which was announced in the Keynote, was “ABAP in the Cloud”. This is great news; the future of ABAP is looking good. It will enable us to create Full Stack apps in the cloud on top of ABAP. But, why did they wait so long to do this? This sounds great and big, but is it also that big of a deal? Nowadays, you can download and install ABAP on your local computer. I don’t know much about infrastructure but maybe they had to extend the server center to support this?

Talking about ABAP in the Cloud brings me to the next topic, the SAP Web IDE.

SAP Web IDE

The SAP Web IDE is everywhere! In every session they talk about the SAP Web IDE. UI5 development, Workflow, IoT, Mobile, … you can develop on all these cloud services with the SAP Web IDE! The only question I have: If ABAP is moving to the cloud, will it also move to the SAP Web IDE? If they also follow the principle of one for the IDE’s, then it will go to the SAP Web IDE.

SAP Cloud Platform

I always thought that SAP would replace the NEO environment with the new Cloud Foundry environment, but I must reconsider my thoughts. Next to NEO and CF, SAP also added Kubernetes to the Cloud Platform and they joined Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It looks like SAP will expand the SAP Cloud Platform with more Cloud technologies and not choosing for one Cloud technology.  By adding more Cloud Technologies, SAP will be able to adapt more services on top of the Cloud Platform. The Cloud Platform in general makes it already very easy to adapt new services. An overview of what the SAP Cloud Platform currently contains and what is running on which environment. Machine Learning is also using Kubernetes, which is not in this overview.

Frequi

Did you ever dream of creating a full-stack Java-Fiori app with only a few lines of code? Thanks to Frequi it’s possible. Frequi has created a framework that generates a complete Java OData services with a Fiori app on top of it in only a few lines. Not only display apps, but also complex apps with create, update and delete functions. If you don’t have UI5 developers and need an app quick, then you should contact Frequi. During a meeting with the SAP mentors, they created a complete app in less than one hour. This looks promising! Keep up the magnificent work! More about Frequi at https://frequi.de/

Besides all of this, there is much more going on at SAP. With only tree days it’s not possible to get to know everything. To stay up to date with the last updates, you can follow https://open.sap.com . It’s a great platform to learn all the cool stuff of SAP and stay up to date.

Looking forward to the next Teched!

Kind regards,

Wouter