The BASIS of SAP

A brief summary of SAP Tech Ed 2010

Some thoughts on the ‘On Premise, On Demand, On Device’ mantra which was very evident at at TechEd in Las Vegas this year. 

* There was less empahasi on the iPad and iPad nano (aka iPhone), compared to the impression I had received about SAPPHIRE (despite the presence in the timetable of the session CD125 iPhone and iPad in the Enterprise).  I do know that the number of Android devices on the the market has driven their prices well below those of the equivalent Apple devices, with the implication being that choosing one device type over another may make the difference in the financial viability of a large scale mobile rollout.

* Another issue was device standardisation (See presentation CD123 The Device Challenge – Selecting the Right Mobile Devices for Your Enterprise).  On the one hand, designing interfaces to be device agnostic means you end up with the lowest common denominator, but on the other hand, each device type does have unique capabilities.  One interesting approach with some potential is a product called Caffeine (you’ll need Code Exchange access), written and released into the public domain by an SAP employee.  It enables, the execution of ABAP on new platforms, such as Java (JVM), Android (Dalvik VM), the iOS (ObjectiveC).  The most obvious use case is where an ABAP programmer writes ABAP code (that runs on the device, not the server) and this code is used by device specific programs.  The idea here is that the ABAP people know the business structure and logic, and this is written once, while the device specific coding is handled by device specific programmers.

On the minimalist end of the scale, my team got a bit of praise at the Innovation weekend for having a simple HTML interface that used a server based PHP program with REST APIs to communicate with an application we developed in SAP’s River cloud.  This meant we could have demonstrated the product with much older technology than Androids or iPhones – an important consideration when dealing with volunteers and non-profit organisations.  A much more impressive example were the 2010 Las Vegas Demo Jam Winners Matt Harding and Al Templeton (BTW, I’ms not a barbarian, I’m a Tasmanian was made about these guys) who used an HTML5 interface for data entry requiring a modern browser, but still relatively device independent.

* As an aside, Rui Nogueira gave a presentation on Code Exchange.  Some people (myself included) had some issues with what we saw as onerous licensing requirements.  I was able to have what was effectively a one-on-one with Rui later on in the week, and have a seperate post percolating away on that, to be posted real soon.

* The current and soon to be released features of the Adaptive Computing tools (See ALM208 Adaptive Computing Virtualization and ALM214 Virtual Reality) now let you manage the entire stack, from the physical in-house AND cloud resources, right up to starting and stopping individual SAP instances.  There’s an argument that vendor specific tools may do a better job of managing these resources, but the whole point is that the resources at your disposable may not be vendor specific.  I certainly got the impression that the latest release (due out in GA early 2011) provide more than enough sophistication for a site where the majority of the workload is SAP based.  And the ACC tools come with the Netweaver license, no extra cost except for configuration.

 * BusinessByDesign will come with an SDK (see CD107 Developing SAP Business ByDesign Applications Using Partner Development Infrastructure), supposedly available to partners only, for creating and modifying functionality.  The version we got to use in the hands-on session was a bit clunky, but it was functional, and it was still a pre-release version.  From my perspective, the elephant in the room is that sizing becomes even more of a black art; Architechs can estimate what queries wil be made and how often, and the impact that this will have on system load (from hardware resources to virtual server to network load to preseentation device), but this can all be blown out of the water by a developer or end user ‘having a bright idea’  It’s a reminder that the physical infrastructure needs to be supported by a new (for SAP, anyway) type of agile process, to allow for qucik but accurate provision of the resources to back up demand surges, while making sure that they are in fact real demand and not caused by an error in the application

* To me the biggest takeaway from the conference was the one phrase, especially from the SAP mentors (I know a few and have worked with a couple of them, so I may have got to go and hear a few things I possibly shouldn’t have…),

“It’s not your Grand Dad’s / Grand Ma’s SAP any more”

Whether you’re part of a System Integrator or large partner, like I am, or an independent consultant, or somewhere in between, we all need to get up to speed on what tools and techniques are available to us and our customers.  While conferences like SAP TechEd provide invaluable networking opportunities, you don’t have to go…. for example, most of the SAP Teched 10 presenatations are available off the SCN e-learn page (search for the SAP TechEd 2010 link). 

But there’s more (no steak knives though) …

1) ondemand.com is an SAP site which allows you free access to perform BI analytics on small sets of data  (you can pay for more storage if you wish).

2) Sustainability is supported by SAP’s Carbon Impact on Demand,

3) the live Collaborative Decision Making site. 

4) Don’t forget the Development versions of the latest SAP software from Crystal Reports to ABAP that you can install on your laptop, at home or in the cloud.

 It also helps to keep up to date with the latest news; for example, did you know what was happeing to Web Dynpro Java ?- See The Future of SAP Java UIs – Breaking News and Customer Dialogue from SAP TechEd Las Vegas and Kiss of Death for Web Dynpro Java – The Follow-Up Questions.

I have an aggregated SAP News feed which includes most SCN articles and blog entries from the last 30 days, but also other industry sources (such as jonerp.com ).  Feel free to use it.

Life is changingg, SAP is changing, and while there is always too much information to absorb and lots of new things clamouring for our attention, there are easy ways to keep up to date with SAP the company, SAP the product(s) and SAP the industry.

Mastering SAP Technology 2008 Conference

I’ve just got home from this years Mastering SAP Technologies conference.  Over 50 presentations and 4 workshops in the three formal days, plus a useful SAP Community Day / ‘unconference’ on the Sunday immediately prior to the conference.  As usual at these things, the informal networking was as much fun as the rest of the conference  (thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the drinks on Sunday night).  One of the highlights was meeting and talking to Thomas Jung and Peter McNulty from SAP Labs in Paolo Alto, USA.  There was a lot to learn, and I was impressed by how willing people in general (not just the presenters,  SAP staff or vendor staff) were to share their experiences.

 

Mike Nicholls (talking) and myself (in one of THOSE shirts) facilitated one of the SDN BOF sessions – this one was tentatively titled “Portals implementation technical how to”. 

 

Most of the people who sat in on this did not have an SAP portal at all, and were only considering it because they wanted to implement ESS / MSS. 

 

This lead to some people discussing how it was theoretically possible to run ESS or MSS (or write your own equivalent) without the SAP portal.  However, Mike did a good job of explaining exactly how impractical it was.

 

It was here that I was struck by how underutilised the SAP portal was in most sites (in Australia at least), with little or no use of Collaboration, Knowledge Management etc.

 

The conference itself was kicked off on Monday morning by a brief keynote from Ishmael Ghalinin (of Intalio of BPMS fame) about living online, a technique called office 2.0.  He manages his life through such online tools as Google Docs and Salesforce.com, and in fact, the computer he was presenting with was one that he’d borrowed for the morning. The obvious flaw turned up when he announced that he was leaving immediately to catch a fligh tfrom Brisbane to the US – the direct Qantas flight giving him approximately 13 hours of no connectivity.

 

Process Integration and Enterprise SOA

Track A (of 5 tracks) was devoted to XI / PI and SOA presentations.  One of the more interesting presentations on day 1 came from this track, from Benjamin Salter of Valero.  He spoke of taming the Enterprise SOA tangle.  The key points, as Mr Salter summarised them were:

Enterprise SOA is a  way of thinking -A design paradigm grounded in reusability. Not a “thing”.
It is an evolution. Existing systems don’t change overnight (but we can evolve),
Enterprise SOA requires participation. It is not a spectator sport! It affects all areas of the organization.

 

Upgrades – Planning, Preparation and Implementation

Track B focused on upgrades and the issues associated with them.  A couple of organisations shared their experiences, but the most useful one to me was the “Implementing Solution Manager” presentation from Dion Ellison.  Having done installed Solution manager recently myself for a customer, it was interesting to see what differences there were between our philosophies.  I had only installed it for some very simple Solution Monitoring.  Dion’s customer had also installed Change Management and Test Management.

 

User Interface – Adobe, NW CE, Portal, etc

Track C focused on the current and new user interfaces.

On day one, Thomas Jung provided a very comprehensive roadmap of SAP’s future UI Strategy.  The key takeaway was that the major tool for presenting data to the client is to be WebDynpro.  The decision about whether you perform your developments in ABAP or JAVA should be based on what skills you have in house, and of course which particular usage type you are developing for (for example, Portals don’t have an ABAP engine, while PI systems have both).

The other takeaway is that whether content was presented via HTML rendering (i.e. browser of your choice) or the new NetWeaver Business Client would be determined at runtime.  The big difference between the two is that a browser will expect HTML and Javascript, as it currently does, with the attendant data transfer size and rendering issues that come with highly structured generated code. On the other hand, the Business Client will accept a smaller file in an XML like format. 

On Day two, Mike Nicholls presented on what we could expect from the next major release of the SAP portal. The key takeaways here were that your portal admin and content management skills are still valid, SAP have redesigned the architecture, providing a more robust platform for the portal, and that the end users probably wouldn’t notice the difference.  As part of the redesign, the Portal will run in a SAP J2EE 5 supplied JVM, similar to the one provided as part of the NetWeaver 7.1 Composition Environment Java EE Trial Version.   We will loose the concept of a J2EE Dispatcher (and therefore the  Visual Administrator tool).

On the other hand, We are promised a Newer configuration tool,
more functions in NetWeaver Administrator,
an MMC style administration tools for non-Windows landscapes,
Some Web Dynpro portal administration screens,
newer (and IMHO hopefully more robust) version of NWDS,
and a newer way to deploy PAR files

 

Infrastructure /  BASIS / Security tracks

Track D and E presentations tended to focus on infrastructure, BASIS and Security topics. 

One of the more enlightening presentations (for me, anyway) was SAP Workloads in VMwareVi3, presented by Andre Kemp, Sr. Product Marketing Manager of VMWare Asia-Pacific.  As part of the presentation, Andre showed a live VMWare ESX server, running on two fairly old physical servers. One of the first things I noticed was how dynamic the changes in resource allocation were; up there with the Workload Management available on larger hardware / operating system combinations (such as AIX 5.x on the larger P5 series machines).  Andre showed how, under the same load, manipulation of the resources (CPU and memory allocation) altered the the percentage of utilisation on the SAP VM being altered, and on the SAP workload itself. 

In a subsequent demonstration, by Tony Garland of ABB Grain, we saw how you could manipulate the VMs so that ostensibly production hardware could be taken offline with little or no impact, and how the VMWare Disaster Recovery Systems worked, by taking a ‘running dump’ of a live system.

Tim Bohlsen gave a 30 – 40 minute over view of his 2 day workshop.  One of the concepts he introduced was Tuning for Response Time versus Tuning for Resource Utilisation.  Tuning for Response Time is when you tune your system(s) till you get sub second Dialog response times, and leave it at that.  Tuning for Resource Utilisation is when you lighten the load, either by tuning individual components of the response time more and more, or by getting rid of extraneous workloads (i.e running a job once a day instead of once an hour).  In effect, as Tim pointed out, removing 50% of the load from a system prior to adding hardware means new hardware is TWICE as valuable. In fact that leads directly to one of the three key points from his presentation –

Even without a crisis, it is always possible to determine the tuning change with the highest potential.
Well tuned system use less hardware, in many cases MUCH LESS !! You can reduce your companies costs through pro-active work.
Squeaky wheels get oiled. BUT…. Shrinking or even removing the wheel can be MUCH more effective.