SAP TechEd 2021, the most awaited event of the year, featured over a hundred informative sessions, including keynotes, lectures, and strategy discussions.
Juergen Mueller’s Keynote
On the first day, SAP Chief Technology Officer and Executive Board Member, Juergen Mueller, talked about how disruptive technologies can help one to thrive within new market realities and be better prepared for the future. He explored the key ingredients for sustainable success, enabled by superior IT, as well as a diverse community of technology developers and enthusiasts. Juergen and his associates also demonstrated how SAP creates a consistent experience across business processes through a business technology platform, using out-of-the-box integrations.
The Developer Keynote
Day 2 began with the Developer Keynote. A wide variety of technologies that could be used together to create a single S/4 HANA Cloud Extension were showcased. These included Kyma, ABAP, Cloud Application Programming Model, and Fiori among others. However, the highlight of the Developer Keynote was the technology demo session:
Witalij Rudnicki queried data using SQL-on-Files capability of SAP HANA Cloud Data Lake.
Michelle Moudy utilized Git Commit hooks to automate tasks.
Kevin Muessig confirmed the power of AR using the SAP BTP SDK for iOS.
Rich Heilman demonstrated extensibility with embedded steampunk in S/4HANA Cloud.
Josh Bentley gave us a demo using SAP Kyma for eventing with SAP mesh and SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery.
Thomas Jung presented the use of service consumption from CAP followed by SAP’s new Low and No Code solutions via the Business Application Studio and AppGyver.
Marius Obert used the SAP Fiori Tools to build an enterprise-ready web app in less than four minutes.
Katharina Schell proved that your first AI experience is just around the corner for free.
They also released the source code of the demos given via a GitHub sample repository so that we could dig deeper into what was showcased.
“SAP TechEd 2021 was a great experience for me. It featured more than 100 sessions, including keynotes, lectures, and road maps. I attended BTP, HANA Cloud and Intelligent Technologies sessions. There was a lot of emphasis on BTP and intelligent technologies and I learned a lot from every session that I attended.” – Abhash Sinha, Engineering Over 20 people attended the various sessions that were organized throughout the event. The main takeaways were:
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, ABAP® environment, offers new extensibility options for ERP solutions SAP has released a dedicated development environment for the ABAP® programming language on SAP S/4HANA Cloud that allows customers and partners to adjust and extend their public cloud enterprise solutions, while keeping a standardized and clean application core. This new environment adds an extensibility option to the previously established SAP BTP, ABAP environment, also known as Steampunk.
SAP® AppGyver®, SAP Business Application Studio to strengthen low-code/no-code app development options Everyone can use powerful no-code development with the SAP AppGyver to deliver sophisticated, enterprise-scale applications for web and mobile apps using an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface. SAP also added a new low-code approach to their Business Application Studio to increase professional developers’ productivity. Its visual programming environment lets users simplify application modelling and dive deeper into code when needed.
Free tier model for SAP BTP now includes individual developer access, SAP HANA® Cloud, SAP Integration Suite SAP has given individual developers access to a free tier model for SAP BTP and to paid service plans for exploring and building, with an easy path to productive use. Shifting from free tier to paid production requires no additional contract. Customers can transition to the production environment without duplicating development effort. The free-tier offering, available as part of Pay-As-You-Go for SAP BTP and Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA), now includes SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Integration Suite.
Features of SAP Conversational AI further simplify bot building SAP introduced new features in their Conversational AI service that make it easier for customers to build and monitor chatbots to automate tasks and workflows on the Business Technology Platform (BTP). Updates to SAP Conversational AI includes the ability to:
Transport bots between tenants: Bot transport updates simplify bot management across different landscapes and tenants, as well as bot migration from the community to an enterprise tenant when customers decide to go to productive usage.
Initialize skills with memory or language: Lets customers define actions required to start a conversation with their chatbots. This skill is automatically executed at the beginning of the conversation and can be used to initialize the memory or language of the conversation. This means that conversations with the bot are more convenient for users.
Configure the web client: A web client for SAP Conversational AI now has more flexibility and an adaptive, responsive design. While configuring the Web client channel, customers can define a custom cascading style sheet (CSS) or provide a link to a stylesheet to fine-tune the look and feel of the web client.
“I enjoyed a lot at this year’s TechEd. The enhancements in technology improve and simplify a developer’s day-to-day life.
We learnt how to create and deliver enterprise-grade applications quickly using SAP Fiori Elements and Cloud Application programming models and how Low-Code No-Code tools like AppGyver help create applications that can run on the web, iOS, and Android devices. The hottest topic for this year though was “Kyma”, the starting point for BTP’s unified runtime strategy to bring different multi-cloud open run times together – which provides services that are consumable everywhere and the choice to use infrastructure anytime.”
– Prashant Patil, Tech Lead
Team Extentia is thankful to have been a part of this year's SAP TechEd. The plethora of information and new technologies the team was exposed was an enriching and educational experience. At Extentia, we are constantly elevating our skillset. We always strive to do better and deliver confidence to our customers. This year's SAP TechEd and all of its sessions have equipped us with the innovative tools and technology required to deliver a seamless experience.
Read other Extentia Blog posts here!