If some industry analysts are right, we are entering a new phase of software development where cloud-native apps will help companies completely redesign business and go-to-market models.
IDC analysts predict that by 2022, the acceleration of legacy app modernization and net-new development will lead to 35 percent of production apps being cloud-native. One year after that, these analysts predict the number of organizations that release code to production daily for select applications will reach 40 percent — it was just three percent in 2019.
I saw a great example of how SAP was meeting this industry-wide challenge for faster application development that supports business transformation during an onsite video interview at SAP TechEd featuring SAP Cloud SDK. Previously called SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK, this software development kit was aptly renamed.
“SAP Cloud SDK is no longer just the bridge to extending innovation on SAP S/4HANA, but a full-fledged tool for cloud-native development across the SAP portfolio,” said Philipp Herzig, head of SAP Cloud Platform Enablement at SAP. “We’re moving toward a pure DevOps approach. Instead of writing code from scratch, developers can use the SAP Cloud SDK to build native-cloud application extensions on a full range of SAP solutions, including SAP C/4HANA and SAP SuccessFactors.”
The updated solution also supports Java and JavaScript, a big nod toward developers in the SAP community that use these popular languages.
SAP Partner Values Speedy Integration
Beyond Technologies is an SAP partner that builds applications on SAP Cloud Platform. CTO Leonardo De Araujo said the SAP Cloud SDK provided easy access to the backend services his company needed. He demonstrated how it helped Beyond Technologies build Visual Planner for SAP, a workload management application.
“There’s a lot of coding and business logic involved when dealing with all the data coming in; in this case, from SAP S/4HANA. That’s where the SAP Cloud SDK accelerated development for us,” remarked De Araujo. “We don’t have to write code from scratch, which gives us the ability to co-innovate faster and speeds up time-to-value.”
De Araujo was very excited about the capabilities to extend co-innovation on additional SAP solutions for two main reasons: “First, this updated SDK further supports SAP Cloud Platform’s cloud foundry environment where we have services that are key for us. Second, being able to easily integrate different SAP solutions beyond SAP S/4HANA aligns with our development road map that includes SAP SuccessFactors.”
Canadian-based Beyond Technologies is also an SAP customer, having used SAP S/4HANA Cloud for several years, along with SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Cloud for Customer, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Concur. De Araujo saw SAP Cloud SDK as important to the company’s high-growth strategies worldwide, including expansions in France, South Africa, and the U.S.
“Our company is growing a lot, and SAP is aligned to where we’re going with our customers beyond SAP S/4HANA,” he said. “Integrating these solutions and building extensions on top using SAP Cloud SDK is critical to our growth.”
Benefits of DevOps Environment
Herzig estimated that the software development kit has already helped reduce development time by 50 percent in many situations, allowing developers to focus on solving their unique business problems. “We’re providing developers with one consistent experience – extending the Intelligent Enterprise using SAP solutions,” Herzig explained. “Downloads of SAP Cloud SDK have steadily increased each month. This is how SAP helps intelligent enterprises connect information company-wide to create differentiating experiences for employees and customers.”
