SAP finally solves developer licensing, launches SAP River, more open source

Disclosure: the last few months I have been back and forth with Vishal Sikka, executive board member SAP in charge of innovation and his line one leadership team on a variety of topics.

SAP used Bangalore TechEd as the place where Vishal Sikka made several important announcements and reinforced other recent developer focused announcements. In summary (and partially from the blurbs):

1. Launched a regional test drive of a new open development environment for SAP HANA. SAP River, a real-time development environment for rapidly building complete native applications powered by SAP HANA and enable increased developer productivity through a simpler development process, easily maintainable source code and a clear separation of intent and yet an optimized native execution on SAP HANA.
2. SAP has created a unified developer license. It covers all major SAP technologies.
3. SAP UI5 is going open source. Not fully, but important parts of the framework. It is available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license.
4. New Service Broker for Cloud Foundry to Connect to SAP HANA. Again on GitHub.
5. New Node.js Connector for SAP HANA. On GitHub.

Three things excite me about this.

Licensing - those who regularly develop on SAP technology will know that SAP has had an arcane license mentality that created numerous problems and potential traps into which the unwary developer could easily fall. Over time, developers found ways around the problem but it was hardly optimal. Internally, SAP's legal team had all the appearance of being the Department That Says No. That has changed in recent times as the company realises that developers will not turn up to companies that make life difficult for them when there are plenty of alternatives.

Open source - enterprise software relies on proprietary technology to maintain control over the revenue stream. SAP has been very successful with this strategy. However, this doesn't always work to its advantage. UI is a prime example where new UIs are being developed at frightening pace. It just makes sense for SAP to remove barriers to adoption and use via open source.

SAP River - in my discussions with SAP, I have consistently argued that no-one other than the SAP community cares about ABAP, the language that underpins much of what SAP offers. On the other hand, Java is also used extensively. So why bring another language to the party? ABAP takes time to learn and is only of any good inside SAP environments. River on the other hand is easy to use and acts in a co-existence fashion with existing supported languages.

More to the point, River allows developers to focus on the business problem and not the connections and other 'cruff' usually needed to get an ABAP program to work. That in turn means developers can fast track prototyping. That in turn means developers can get a lot closer to the business. I'd argue that power users of stuff like Excel will be able to make a good start with their ideas. River is not the polished article. It's a start. I am hoping it will be well received.

Why does this matter?

There is an ongoing discussion in enterprise land about what happens to ERP in the 21st century. This has profound impact on everyone with a vested interest in solutions delivered by the likes of SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

Where in the past, I believed the suite always wins, I now believe the platform wins. By that I mean systems of record will remain important but will fade into the background while companies move their priorities to new systems that fit the dynamics of 21st century business. That inevitably means the mega vendors have to find new ways to compete and remain relevant. Offering a platform that allows for the proliferation of applications becomes critical. Some will be disposable, others will be vertical market specific, while others will reshape existing. All of that has to happen in internet time, not the dog years of traditional development.

One way this manifests itself is in Project Ganges - an effort to reach right across the Indian retail supply chain to include suppliers, retailers and the banking community using HANA as the infrastructure to support real time business. If this works then it will serve as a showcase for other projects around the world.

HANA is SAP's shot at this brave new world. It is not a winner today but has the potential to be on the winners' podium. Setting its stall out to embrace open source and making life easy for developers are key requisites for ensuring that SAP is part of the story and not an afterthought. The next step is to get the whole of SAP's organization behind these tectonic shifts so that the transformation envisaged by Sikka becomes a reality. It is way more than a marketing makeover. It's where the heavy lifting really comes.

ENDNOTE: Some colleagues have expressed mild surprise that I appear to be taking a 'positive' position. For the sake of doubt, I see a fast changing market where SAP could be a long term casualty. This is not a case of 'threats come and go.' This is a real shift. Vishal Sikka shares mine and others belief that the long term future depends in part on SAP's ability to attract a new ecosystem of developers. A year ago, SAP had no real chance of achieving that goal. Having fixed developer licensing and come out the gate with UI5 going to open source, Sikka has clearly signalled the way ahead. That's one heck of an achievement given what everyone who understands SAP knows about the company. Anyone who knows how I roll also knows that I support vendors when they've done what I believe to be the right thing. This is one of those occasions. But it is only the beginning.

Disclosure: SAP is a premier partner at time of writing

Bonus points - interview between Vijay Vijayasankar and Vishal Sikka embedded at top of post

More bonus points: John Appleby takes on 'whiney' Hacker News. My view? Some people have nothing better to do than whine. Ignore them.