Wait, that’s possible?

At the ABAPConf 2025 community day on 3rd June 2025 I gave a presentation with the title “Wait, that’s possible?”. In this post I’ll explain in more detail the reasoning behind the presentation.

Every IT technology has its own ecosystem. SAP formed their own world, or better, universe. There are a lot of discussions going on in the SAP universe about the how and why of SAP software, its importance, how SAP is thriving innovation or how the technology sector or business in general won’t be able to survive without SAP at all. The problem with this kind of understanding of your own importance: SAP is not just its own universe; it is a parallel universe. Or simpler: a gigantic echo chamber. While at the center of SAP, the perception is that there is nothing more important, in reality, we must admit that SAP is pretty much unknown. It is not such a big player even in the IT world as some think. And outside the IT bubble? Good luck finding people that even know the name SAP. Do not forget that IT is still a bubble, even with Apple or Google being worldwide known. There are sport events that show that IT is a bubble. Currently there is the FIFA club championship running in the USA, and while the numbers might not be as high as expected, they still crush the participation numbers of a regular IT event. And you can find people around the world wearing a football shirt, but that might have no access to the internet.

This simple, yet often ignored fact was part of the first part of the presentation. There are IT conferences in the world that easily outnumber any SAP event. It is not even necessary to look only at the big players like AWS, Google or Apple. Even events targeted at a very specific bubble inside a bubble like security attracts participants at a order of magnitude higher than SAP events do. While it is easy to find people on the street that know Apple or Google, you won’t find as easily someone that knows SAP. And the reason is simple: others offer products to people, SAP is business to business.

The b2b aspect explains why SAP is not the innovative company many think it is. While there are SAP employees working on cutting edge technology, the impact to adopt those and to incorporate them in the portfolio comes from the outside. Other companies invent, adopt and thrive the adoption of new trends. Simply because they have to, because that’s their unique selling point. Looking at trends from the past 10 to 20 years, you can see that e.g. UX, mobile, API come from companies like Apple, Uber, Airbnb, Google, etc. SAP adopted these trends later on. There was demand from customers that SAP had to serve. Pressure was built up by demanding: we want that too. Many of these trends took some while to be available in an SAP product, but they were made available. As time to adoption can take even longer in the SAP universe: SAP needs to ship it, customers need to buy it, update to the correct release, adopt it, use it and create the foundation to have a ecosystem of people, developers, consultants knowing it. This is a long running, time and resource consuming process and not every hype is going to stay. Think blockchain and the SAP products that were using it. And it takes more time than you might have expected, like API adoption. Yet again: SAP is about b2b and business core processes. What counts is that SAP offers solutions that allow their customers to be innovative. That’s one of the reason SAP is used by companies: it allows them to be innovative without having to take too much care of their ERP system.

Outside the SAP universe, software is built differently. Having to support a piece of software for 10, 15 or 20 (or even longer)? That’s a rare case. Exists, yes, but normally the software built is rather short living. The new world of AI is such a “move fast, break things” environment. The news, articles, show cases you find are targeted at the average person. Companies are trying to sell their solutions to normal people. The end user. The people that are also sitting at the other side of the SAP software. And those are suddenly seeing and experiencing what is possible. Things can be done by them with the help of AI that were not possible a few years ago. They can write programs. Writing your own Asteroids version is only a matter of minutes. Writing the code isn’t the most problematic part of it: generating images or sound files is. That’s the “Wait, that’s possible?” moment for those people. Realizing that yes, it is possible. They might still not understand all the nitty gritty details or the limitations, but it works for them. So yes, it is possible.

The empowerment of the end user is going to create problems. They are working at SAP customers, they are the end user, key user, functional guys. They get presented everywhere how easy it is to code. How AI accelerates development. They can create their own apps. Apps that go beyond no code or low code. When there is something to code, to deploy: the AI does the magic. While the result is still not enterprise ready, they do not care. Perception shifts. When developers say that creating an app takes 6 months, the customer side can now say: 2 months. Why? Because the design mock-up was already prepared using some AI tool. The specification was optimized by AI. A working version is already deployed thanks to AI. And the test data? AI, AI, AI. While all of this might seem great from the end user side, from a developer side this might be nothing more than just noise, or only provide little help. But: the customer side will say: I do not pay for 6 months, look what I did in 2 days. You have 2 months to make it production ready. And even when the developer side can increase the demand expectation, it might be 3 or 4 months only, still far away from the realistic 6 months. And there will be enough developers stating that they can easily do it in 2 months, thanks to the help of AI. You’ll have to adapt to the new expectations on the client side and you’ll have to make sure you are as efficient and can deliver as good results in 3 or 4 months. The time you had 6 months is gone.

SAP developers are not immune to this trend. What helps is there are not as much SAP or ABAP developers available are there are in other languages, like JavaScript or Java. The SAP developer profile also means that we have more control. The SAP developer is often one person and represents the whole team. This means: more responsibility, but less friction in communication. This makes SAP developers highly efficient. Instead of having to deal with a wide range of technologies, frameworks and platforms that change constantly, we can focus on a smaller set and learn it in depth over the years. This helps to stay relevant. This is also one of the reasons companies use SAP: it allows them to be innovative, to focus on what is important. Validating the current tech stack on a yearly basis and to rewrite constantly code to fit the latest and greatest tech stack: this is not enabling innovation.