Building upon the launch of SAP Build two years ago as a low-code suite running on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), and last year’s announcement of SAP Build Code to add pro-code capabilities to SAP Build, SAP is continuing to broaden its embrace of the developer community by enabling business users to create enterprise applications, automate processes, and design business sites.
For developers already skilled in SAP technologies, recent evolutions of the company’s ABAP programming language in the cloud era have further accelerated the creation of a single suite of tools for extension development — one that encompasses low-code, pro-code, and generative AI capabilities.
Recently, SAP announced the addition of ABAP environments to the SAP Build suite, as part of a broader shift toward fusion development aimed at creating a seamless, end-to-end development experience and bridging the gap between low-code and pro-code tools.
Dr. Alexander Rother, Head of ABAP Product Management at SAP, has acquired deep knowledge of these developments and their implications since starting at SAP in 2017. Initially, Rother honed his skills as a developer for the ABAP platform focused on reuse services (such as logging, jobs, and factory calendars) and acted as quality manager and program manager for SAP Fiori applications.
Since then, Rother has taken on leadership roles, becoming product lead of cloud reuse services development and aiding in the rollout of the SAP BTP ABAP Environment, and ABAP Cloud. Rother also played a role in introducing the three-tier extensibility model, which deepened his connections to the ABAP community, customers, and partners; bringing that development model from the SAP BTP ABAP Environment to the SAP S/4HANA world has resulted in a new paradigm: the SAP S/4HANA Cloud ABAP Environment.
In a recent conversation with ASUG, Rother provided valuable insights into the future of ABAP in the cloud era, ABAP’s evolution, and the impact of technologies like generative AI on ABAP development.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
It’s been six years since SAP launched the SAP BTP ABAP Environment so that developers could build and run ABAP code in the cloud, which allowed for the introduction of the ABAP Cloud development model. What’s happened since? How has ABAP Cloud expanded, and how has it fit into the SAP developer tools strategy?
2018 was the year when we launched the SAP BTP ABAP environment. This was the first time we had full-fledged ABAP development in a cloud environment while strictly separating the SAP and customer codes. We call this a release contract. We established these release contracts for the APIs and technologies so that we guide all customer and partner developments toward the released APIs and the ABAP Cloud technologies. That was a game-changer for us. Now, six years later, it has matured, and we are in very good shape for everything ahead of us.
“You can keep your existing knowledge, transform it, and adapt it to new technologies.”
This shift toward standardization in the cloud seems to have redefined the ABAP developer’s role. How did you approach this transition from your end?
Now, there’s a technological shift from the classic world toward the cloud world. Something needs to be learned. As a classic ABAP developer, you have a very strong background to do all the upskilling required for the ABAP Cloud. It’s not something that you have never seen before. You can keep your existing knowledge, transform it, and adapt it to new technologies.
Learning is very important. More and more, you will hear about fusion development, combining different aspects of development, from low-code to pro-code. It’s not about being one developer or the other but bringing things together, bringing different development skills from low-code offerings, pro-code offerings, from SAP BTP to on-stack learning, and achieving results and solutions together.
At SAP TechEd in 2021, SAP announced it was opening up ABAP to the wider SAP community. Tell me about this decision to evolve ABAP from a proprietary SAP product into an open-source programming language, and how the community has driven its development since then.
ABAP is SAP’s proprietary programming language. The core of ABAP and the fundamental technology remains proprietary. That’s important for us to shape ABAP to all our business development needs at SAP. But at the same time, the community around us has grown. Step by step, there have been more and more open-source projects. We are very proud of our community for driving these kinds of projects.
How do you collaborate with the community on ABAP’s development? Where do these conversations and engagements typically happen?
What is very important for us is the direct connection with our customers, partners, and developers. As of COVID-19, there are many virtual engagement possibilities. We just had virtual TechEd and the Devtoberfest. These are very important formats for rollout virtually to engage with the community. After COVID-19, the on-site and live events became more and more important. We love to engage on-site with our customers and partners to discuss and have hands-on sessions.
Could you share a specific example where community feedback led to updates in the ABAP programming language?
We have this exchange regularly, and it actively influences the development of ABAP technology. We have the customer influence channels that are available. Even more informally, we learn a lot when we talk to our customers. We bring that to our ABAP technology development.
Imagine the three-tier extensibility model for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition. We have Tier 1 for ABAP Cloud development on-stack and the entire BTP offering side-by-side. In addition, we have Tier 2 and Tier 3 for Cloud API enablement, in case a released API is missing and for classic ABAP, respectively. The private cloud is one of the target solutions for our installed base when they move from SAP ECC to the SAP S/4HANA. And when they bring over their classic extensions from ECC, they all end up in Tier 3.
So far, in the three-tier extensibility model, we have told customers to remove as much as possible from that Tier 3 coding when moving to SAP S/4HANA. Clean up the stack. Then, if there is a business case, pursue a transformation to Tier 1. The third path is to adapt your Tier 3 coding at least to make it more upgrade-stable. Here is one of the pieces of feedback we got from the community and our customers’ partners: We didn’t tell too much about how to adapt the classic ABAP to at least become more upgrade-stable. This is something where we’ve invested. In Q4 this year, you can expect more news regarding that.
More than five million developers are currently using the ABAP programming language. Last year, SAP launched new role-based certification and free learning resources for back-end developers using the ABAP Cloud development model. A year later, how would you evaluate the status of evolving and upskilling ABAP developers?
The certification is one of the key pillars of our standardized learning offering around ABAP Cloud and clean-core extensibility, SAP S/4HANA extensibility. We have several learning paths provided by our learning organization. There’s tremendous interest in everything regarding ABAP Cloud. This is very good from our point of view because ABAP Cloud is one of the key elements in the clean-core strategy and the three-tier extensibility model. More customers and partners are embracing ABAP Cloud now. They are developing customer extensions with ABAP Cloud on SAP BTP and on-stack. But there’s still room for improvement.
At SAP TechEd this year, the merger of ABAP Cloud and SAP Build was announced. Consequently, SAP BTP ABAP Environment is available in the SAP Build product portfolio and represents another integrated tool for extending side-by-side systems. Tell us about this announcement and what it signifies for the direction of ABAP at SAP.
In 2022, SAP Build was solely the low-code, no-code portfolio. We have SAP Build Apps, SAP Build Process Automation, and the SAP Build Work Zone. In 2023, there was the first step of the evolution. SAP Build Code was born to offer a pro-code development offering on BTP, focusing on CAP, the cloud application programming model for Java and JavaScript.
The reality that we recognize is that for real-life, end-to-end customer and partner scenarios, usually not only low-code or CAP pro-code but also on-Stack and ABAP are involved. The dimensions of pro-code and low-code come together. Here, we want to embrace the fusion development principle. We see that you need multiple technologies, multiple integrated development environments, and sometimes multiple runtimes for end-to-end development scenarios. That must fit easily together.
From the development point of view, you need a harmonized and seamless development experience. Nothing shall stop you from developing your solution. Of course, from the runtime aspect, we must have a harmonized approach here. Imagine you develop an OData service using ABAP Cloud on the SAP S/4HANA stack and build a SAP Fiori app. But you do this in Business Application Studio, which is now part of the SAP Build Code. So you have a combination of on-stack and side-by-side, and back-end and front-end. There are multiple tools and products involved which need to work hand-in-hand. And this experience we will deliver with SAP Build including ABAP Cloud.
How does this announcement reflect the overall trend at SAP toward empowering one to be a developer (be that a low-code, no-code, or pro-code developer), and how does it reinforce the need for skilled ABAP developers?
Everything is needed — pro-code, low-code, front-end, back-end. And then it, of course, depends on your specialization. Not everyone is a full-fledged front-end developer. Maybe your colleague is doing the front end with JavaScript, SAP UI5, and SAP Fiori, and you are focusing on the ABAP back end. It means working on your home turf, adopting new technologies, and learning where the bridges that need to be built are. Either you do that on your own and develop full-stack, front-end to back-end, or you collaborate with your colleagues. Then, you know exactly how to traverse the different tools and products. We bring this with the fusion development principle and the SAP Build story.
"Our CEO, Christian Klein, also told us that the world’s economy is running on our shoulders. A large part of these shoulders is built with ABAP.”
At SAP Sapphire this year, NVIDIA and SAP revealed generative AI efforts to offer new capabilities for Joule, including ABAP developer capabilities, with NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang declaring that, “at SAP, the most valuable language is ABAP.” What makes ABAP so valuable to SAP?
Being head of ABAP product management, I celebrated that moment. That was really nice. In the same keynote, our CEO, Christian Klein, also told us that the world’s economy is running on our shoulders. A large part of those shoulders is built with ABAP. We are currently with our customers in the transition from the classic on-premises business suite toward our Cloud ERP with SAP S/4HANA. The core of the classic business suite and S/4HANA in all editions is built using ABAP. This is where the value is and where the importance and the impact of ABAP come from.
As generative AI sweeps across the landscape, some developers have expressed concern about the future of their work in technology, fearing that automation will replace them. And yet generative AI tools can’t teach debugging and security-by-design, and the ingenuity of human developers continues to set the best applications apart. How do you see the future of the ABAP developer role evolving alongside generative AI, especially in terms of building enterprise-grade apps?
It is super important that we offer generative AI capabilities in ABAP. For that reason and our own reasons, we will embed full generative AI support for ABAP Cloud development in any of our tools where it is relevant. However, one thing to keep in mind is that generative AI will not make your ABAP developers obsolete. It is better to think of generative AI as a buddy that sits next to you as a developer and helps you with your everyday tasks. It sees the same screen that you see. It has the same context you know and hopefully also understands the business and the problem you are trying to solve.
With that knowledge, generative AI will help you with predictions, code predictions, suggestions, unit tests, code explanations, and so on. It’s helping you with your everyday work, but it’s not making you obsolete. We’ll make ABAP developers more productive. We will also deliver an ABAP AI SDK that allows you, as an ABAP developer, to infuse generative AI into your business applications. Using it, you can include generative AI in an easy way. It will just be some classes and interfaces that you need to call in ABAP, and then you have full access to the SAP BTP Generative AI Hub with all its capabilities.
With AI as a “buddy” for developers, how do you see this changing where ABAP developers can focus their expertise?
Having generative AI and a co-pilot as a buddy sitting next to you makes it interactive. You talk with the co-pilot, you talk with Joule, so to say, and in an interactive mode, you will develop your solution and your extension. At ASUG Tech Connect, we will have hands-on sessions where you can try out the first features with generative AI and get a feeling for it. If you insert a prompt with human-readable language, you get some code, explanation, unit test, and so on. It’s a change, but be brave and embrace it. I’m sure you will be more productive in the end and valuable to the market as well.
For more from Dr. Alexander Rother at ASUG Tech Connect, swing by the ABAP Cloud booth and attend the following sessions on SAP Build and ABAP Cloud Story, Joule’s ABAP Developer Capabilities: The Joule Copilot, ABAP Cloud: Introduction and Roadmap, ABAP Cloud: Building Cloud-Ready Applications and Extensions for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition, Managing Clean Core Extensibility in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, Extending SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: Tools and Insights, Hands-on Lab: Clean Core Extensions with the 3-Tier Model for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition, and Hands-on Lab: Building Extensions with ABAP Cloud and ABAP Development Tools in Joule.