There would be no introduction portion for this blog as I am going straight to the issues which I think should be considered for revision by SAP.
1. If anyone has visited this page would know what I am going to talk about. SAP has been madly promoting HANA. Any official site of SAP would mention about that, required or not is not the matter of concern though. I was visiting AiE (ABAP in Eclipse) page the other day and even that page contained as much of HANA as possible. So, let's say one gets interested in getting trained on HANA by SAP. (as it's recommended to get trained from SAP and not just any other non-certified training centre.) I am sure on getting to know the training charges, one would certainly need to re-think about their plan. My goodness, one lakh seventeen thousand for a training! In this case, either one has to be at the mercy of their organization to get them trained or think about some other cost-efficient training centres or they earn REALLY well to invest the amount. I am not sure what's the average salary of developer's in India and I mean REAL developers who code day in, day out.
On the other side, I would be really interested to know if someone invested the money out of their own pocket and were satisfied with the ROI. I may be naive in my thoughts here.
2. I completely understand and accept that change is constant. SAP is a great example of change and evolution. What seems strange to me is, when a new product is released, the earlier version gets demeaned to a great extent. Ok, for a break I would talk something else and not HANA! AiE gets compared to SE80 in ABAP. My first question would be how valid is this comparison? Secondly, there have been numerous blogs written by SAP wherein the advantages of ADT (ABAP Development Tools) have been highlighted and it's advantages over SE80 is represented. I also read a shameless statement saying, "Currently SE80 and ADT might be same but in future more and more features would be added in ADT"! Absolutely horrendous! And then there lies a favourite word 'Non-disruptive'! The first disruption, such statements cause is in the lives of many developers. Neither customers nor ALL organizations are fast in adopting the new technologies as and when they get released and the reasons for doing so may be perfectly justifiable. So, ultimately a non-SAP developer would have to wait and may have to live with the feeling of working on not-up-to-date technology tools.
3. The favourite, service.sap.com! Recently, I was reading a SAP document to install ADT and it mentioned the pre-requisite to be SAP GUI patch should be greater or equal to 9. It mentioned this could be downloaded from the favourite site but without sharing any link. I searched with every possible way to get there but could not. Luckily, I found the link in one of the discussion forums at scn.sap.com wherein some nice soul had shared the links from where the new patch levels could be downloaded. (I should mention that nicer was the soul who locked this discussion!). I may be exaggerating a little, but installation of AiE is quite a marathon!
I have only these in my mind now but I am sure I would update the list soon!
1. If anyone has visited this page would know what I am going to talk about. SAP has been madly promoting HANA. Any official site of SAP would mention about that, required or not is not the matter of concern though. I was visiting AiE (ABAP in Eclipse) page the other day and even that page contained as much of HANA as possible. So, let's say one gets interested in getting trained on HANA by SAP. (as it's recommended to get trained from SAP and not just any other non-certified training centre.) I am sure on getting to know the training charges, one would certainly need to re-think about their plan. My goodness, one lakh seventeen thousand for a training! In this case, either one has to be at the mercy of their organization to get them trained or think about some other cost-efficient training centres or they earn REALLY well to invest the amount. I am not sure what's the average salary of developer's in India and I mean REAL developers who code day in, day out.
On the other side, I would be really interested to know if someone invested the money out of their own pocket and were satisfied with the ROI. I may be naive in my thoughts here.
2. I completely understand and accept that change is constant. SAP is a great example of change and evolution. What seems strange to me is, when a new product is released, the earlier version gets demeaned to a great extent. Ok, for a break I would talk something else and not HANA! AiE gets compared to SE80 in ABAP. My first question would be how valid is this comparison? Secondly, there have been numerous blogs written by SAP wherein the advantages of ADT (ABAP Development Tools) have been highlighted and it's advantages over SE80 is represented. I also read a shameless statement saying, "Currently SE80 and ADT might be same but in future more and more features would be added in ADT"! Absolutely horrendous! And then there lies a favourite word 'Non-disruptive'! The first disruption, such statements cause is in the lives of many developers. Neither customers nor ALL organizations are fast in adopting the new technologies as and when they get released and the reasons for doing so may be perfectly justifiable. So, ultimately a non-SAP developer would have to wait and may have to live with the feeling of working on not-up-to-date technology tools.
3. The favourite, service.sap.com! Recently, I was reading a SAP document to install ADT and it mentioned the pre-requisite to be SAP GUI patch should be greater or equal to 9. It mentioned this could be downloaded from the favourite site but without sharing any link. I searched with every possible way to get there but could not. Luckily, I found the link in one of the discussion forums at scn.sap.com wherein some nice soul had shared the links from where the new patch levels could be downloaded. (I should mention that nicer was the soul who locked this discussion!). I may be exaggerating a little, but installation of AiE is quite a marathon!
I have only these in my mind now but I am sure I would update the list soon!
I liked this blog. Its my kind of rant :).About the 3 points you have mentioned
ReplyDeletea) I believe SAP is promoting HANA everywhere because Marketing plays a very important part in software purchase. Remember Apple just that Apple has a die hard fan club.( Did you ever see an apple commercial ? ). With mobility and HANA one thing that is fundamentally different is there approach. With a mission statement to have 1 billion users( heard it when i was in SAP ), it is providing free education through SAP Mobiles Apps partner program & www.open.sap.com. At open.sap.com , you can find a free course on HANA. SAP charges a bomb for training and there has been a good amount of discussion on certification. Less said better it is :)
b) I was a part of the early team which started working in Abap in Eclipse. One thing that I would like to mention is that most of the cool features you see in se80 editor , are sourced from eclipse and ecosystem is more familiar eclipse.(consider mobile apps & startups SAP is targeting).This development is targeted at Eclipse developers who can be converted into ABAP fold.
c) SAP internalizes lots of knowledge in service.sap.com You are worried about missing links from service.sap.com & I am worried about knowledge that is not available to everyone.That has changed with the new economy products around mobility & big data but scores of people don't in those areas :)
~Regards,
Kavindra