Many business applications leverage capabilities and data from SAP solutions to achieve specific business requirements. To communicate with those SAP solutions, developers want straightforward access to services and messages offered by SAP solutions.
Addressing these needs, today SAP announced the SAP Cloud software development kit (SDK) as a consistent toolset for interacting with SAP solutions when developing cloud-native extension applications.
When moving toward an intelligent enterprise, no single SAP solution stands on its own. In addition to integrating SAP solutions, many companies build custom applications that extend the standard functionality offered by SAP in order to deliver uniquely differentiating capabilities for their business.
Those custom-built extensions communicate with different SAP solutions — one business application may access sales order data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud while another triggers an approval process in SAP SuccessFactors software. A third could combine capabilities of SAP C/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA for unique customer experiences, possibly coupled with machine learning services consumed from SAP Cloud Platform. Previously, that may have involved different, often low-level technologies and diverse APIs with which to communicate.
With an intelligent enterprise framework, SAP is committed to give customers a consistent experience with SAP solutions. This also includes a consistent approach to developing extensions and communicating with SAP solutions when writing source code. SAP Cloud SDK delivers on this promise.
Partners are already looking forward to leveraging the SDK in their projects. SAP partner cbs Corporate Business Solutions gained early insights into SAP Cloud SDK.
“We are very pleased with the strategic direction and evolution speed of the SAP Cloud SDK,” said Dr. Karsten Kötter, head of Cloud Platform, cbs. “Leveraging the new feature in our customer projects enables us to integrate and unlock the massive capabilities of SAP Cloud Platform even faster and more seamlessly.”
Partners building large-scale applications or customer-specific adaptions are not the only beneficiaries of the tools and libraries provided by SAP Cloud SDK.
For any development team implementing such custom applications that interact with SAP, the SDK makes life easier while helping reduce development effort and improve quality. Available for the Java and JavaScript programming languages, the libraries of the SDK provide significant functionality that allows developers to focus on their business logic, because the SDK takes care of the low-level infrastructure and boilerplate code. For example, instead of developers implementing time and again how to authenticate to the involved solutions, they can conveniently leverage the SDK and boost their development speed and quality.
Additionally, the continuous delivery toolkit of the SDK offers an out-of-the-box pipeline for bringing applications developed with the SDK into production and continuously deploy changes. Without a heavy investment into setting up continuous delivery, development teams are thus able to get their features and fixes quickly to their users and adopt a DevOps culture. Essentially, SAP Cloud SDK delivers cloud-native best practices to development teams in an easy-to-adopt manner.
Software development startups such as Poksundo GmbH particularly appreciate the boost of their DevOps practices brought to them out-of-the-box by SAP Cloud SDK.
“We are very excited to be one of the first to use the new SAP Cloud SDK,” said Peter Hauser, CEO of Poksundo, a startup from the dormakaba-Group. “Our initial experience shows that the SDK provides a comprehensive and ideal tool for all integration topics around SAP Cloud Platform. We expect a significant acceleration of our DevOps processes and our continuous delivery pipeline.”
SAP Cloud SDK is the next evolution of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK, which focused on fulfilling the needs of developers building SAP S/4HANA extensions. Based on the well known capabilities of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK, SAP Cloud SDK provides the same benefits also to developers that face the task of interacting with other SAP solutions, such as SAP SuccessFactors or SAP C/4HANA.
The straightforward integration of SAP S/4HANA remains an important building block of the SDK. SAP Cloud SDK is available for applications on SAP Cloud Platform. It is well integrated into the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model but can also be used with other frameworks and environments.
Long-time users of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK such as msg are excited about this next step and having capabilities known from the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK now available for their projects beyond SAP S/4HANA.
“As one of the front-runners with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK, we are excited about its transformation to SAP Cloud SDK,” said Helmut Koenigseder, IT architect at msg. “We are sure that the SAP Cloud SDK will become a key enabler for the whole SAP ecosystem, helping all the SAP offerings to grow closer together. We are looking forward to evaluating the new SDK integration features for additional SAP solutions, especially SAP Business ByDesign, in our project.”
For more information on how to use the SAP Cloud SDK today, read a technical introduction here.
Those attending SAPPHIRE NOW can visit topic station DI314, “SAP S/4HANA Cloud Integration and Extension,” and talk to the experts onsite.
