A com­pre­hen­sive ABAP devel­op­ment mod­el for the cloud age, ABAP Cloud is avail­able in SAP S/4HANA and on SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form, serv­ing as a key pil­lar in cus­tomers’ clean core and cloud journeys.

In his role as Prod­uct Lead for ABAP Cloud & RAP at SAP SE, Fabi­an Fell­hauer over­sees the ABAP Cloud devel­op­ment mod­el, from Core Data Ser­vices (CDS) objects and data mod­el­ing to trans­ac­tion and dig­i­tal run­times behind the pro­gram­ming language. 

Exe­cut­ing these mod­els and def­i­n­i­tions of busi­ness appli­ca­tions requires work by var­i­ous devel­op­ment teams, but ​“all of us are work­ing toward the com­mon goal of pro­vid­ing a very effi­cient, future-proof devel­op­ment mod­el for our cus­tomers, as well as man­ag­ing the back­log, require­ments, and vision of the devel­op­ment mod­el,” Fell­hauer said.

At this year’s SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence, Fell­hauer will speak along­side Frank Jentsch, Devel­op­ment Exec­u­tive at SAP SE, on two ses­sions ded­i­cat­ed to ABAP Cloud — one a roadmap review, the oth­er a strat­e­gy talk, both pro­vid­ing insights into the inte­gra­tion tech­nolo­gies, gen­er­a­tive AI, cus­tom code trans­for­ma­tion, and ABAP REST­ful appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming mod­el, among oth­er evolv­ing capa­bil­i­ties that allow ABAP Cloud to dri­ve tech­ni­cal innovation.

This inter­view has been edit­ed and condensed. 

At last year’s SAP Sap­phire, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called ABAP ​“the most valu­able lan­guage at SAP.” It’s not the only moment at which SAP’s pro­pri­etary pro­gram­ming lan­guage appears to have tak­en on added sig­nif­i­cance across the company’s tech­nol­o­gy port­fo­lio in recent years. What evo­lu­tions have you seen recent­ly with ABAP in the cloud?

Of course, ABAP comes from a state­ful pro­gram­ming mod­el, so we had our SAP-GUIs and end-to-end inte­gra­tions there, but when we’re talk­ing about a devel­op­ment mod­el in ABAP Cloud, we want to make sure the cus­tomers can build appli­ca­tions that can run in the cloud envi­ron­ment. And so, you’re talk­ing about cloud-ready appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment, mean­ing you need to ensure cer­tain cloud qual­i­ties with­in your appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment. Assist­ing a devel­op­er in ful­fill­ing exact­ly this is the essence of ABAP. 

ABAP has always aimed, in the past and today, to be a lan­guage for devel­op­ers who are not deep into the tech­nolo­gies; when talk­ing about cloud qual­i­ties, for exam­ple ensur­ing rate lim­i­ta­tions or imple­ment­ing cir­cuit break­er strate­gies to make sure cloud sys­tems are run­ning, ABAP is not at that lev­el of tech­ni­cal detail. We abstract tech­ni­cal com­plex­i­ty for our appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers, so appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers can focus on imple­ment­ing the busi­ness log­ic, because this is need­ed to build busi­ness applications.

Espe­cial­ly with ABAP Cloud, we focus on major areas, like reduc­ing the tech­ni­cal com­plex­i­ty to build a busi­ness appli­ca­tion, to reduce com­pli­ance issues for busi­ness appli­ca­tions. Areas such as secu­ri­ty are already cov­ered through the ecosys­tem of ABAP Cloud. 

We’re talk­ing about an appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment mod­el which is intu­itive, that you could direct­ly jump in and start with a data mod­el — because this is what your busi­ness appli­ca­tion is made of — then hav­ing your rel­e­vant busi­ness log­ic on top of that by adding, for exam­ple, deter­mi­na­tions and val­i­da­tions, as well as very eas­i­ly inte­grat­ed UI capabilities. 

That devel­op­ment roadmap, it seems fair to say, is focused on user expe­ri­ence. Can you dis­cuss how the evo­lu­tion of ABAP is serv­ing to aid cus­tomers in sys­tem upgrades and oth­er types of tech­nol­o­gy transformation? 

No one wants to mod­el and design his own UI today, espe­cial­ly if we’re talk­ing about stan­dard soft­ware, so it’s about pro­vid­ing a declar­a­tive mod­el and expos­ing all those capa­bil­i­ties to gener­ic UIs, like Fiori ele­ments, which is one major aspect of the end-to-end ABAP cloud devel­op­ment model. 

We also real­ized that cus­tomers in the past were chal­lenged to com­plete sys­tem upgrades. Upgrad­ing to a new­er ABAP ver­sion was quite cum­ber­some for our cus­tomers because, of course, APIs had changed in the past. Busi­ness log­ic and appli­ca­tion com­po­nents were changed in the past, some­times incom­pat­i­bly, which led to frus­tra­tion on the cus­tomer side. Upgrades were not done so often, and this led to cus­tomers not get­ting the lat­est inno­va­tions. They were stay­ing on on-premis­es envi­ron­ments, not com­plet­ing upgrades, and not receiv­ing new innovations. 

Today, we see that cus­tomers are demand­ing inno­va­tions, so they can ben­e­fit from AI capa­bil­i­ties. The ABAP cloud devel­op­ment mod­el, and those AI capa­bil­i­ties, are now com­ing at the right time, because cus­tomers are now real­iz­ing they need to upgrade to be able to catch up with the inno­va­tions in tech­nol­o­gy, and they’re see­ing those tech­nolo­gies are inte­grat­ed into ABAP Cloud — but only in new­er versions. 

There­fore, in our devel­op­ment, we’d moved to the cloud some years ago. We also made sure that cus­tomers were only able to access things that won’t harm any upgrade, that they’re only access­ing released APIs, which are kept sta­ble, which are assigned to a man­aged life­cy­cle and com­pat­i­bil­i­ty life­cy­cle. With those APIs, it’s very easy to upgrade to new­er ABAP ver­sions and to catch up with all those inno­va­tions which we are deliv­er­ing in new releases. 

That’s what ABAP Cloud is made of: get­ting those inno­va­tions into the cloud, to allow for the cus­tomer to build cloud-ready busi­ness appli­ca­tions but also mak­ing sure that new inno­va­tions are deliv­ered to our cus­tomers. They do not need to stick with one soft­ware ver­sion; they’re able to do upgrades over and over again, with­out invest­ing too much mon­ey on that.

What don’t peo­ple under­stand about ABAP Cloud that you find your­self edu­cat­ing SAP cus­tomers around? 

What I want to empha­size is that ABAP Cloud is not an envi­ron­ment. We have an ABAP envi­ron­ment in the cloud; it’s the SAP BTP ABAP envi­ron­ment. But ABAP Cloud is the devel­op­ment mod­el to build cloud-ready applications. 

You do not need to have a cloud envi­ron­ment in the SAP BTP ABAP envi­ron­ment, for exam­ple, to use ABAP Cloud. You can also use ABAP Cloud in your on-prem envi­ron­ment, using S/4HANA on-premise, or in S/4HANA, pri­vate cloud, pub­lic cloud, and SAP BTP ABAP envi­ron­ment. You can use ABAP cloud every­where, right? You’re able to build ABAP-based and cloud-ready appli­ca­tions every­where, even if your envi­ron­ment which you’re run­ning on is not yet run­ning in the cloud. 

This helps cus­tomers in the tran­si­tion phase to com­plete a migra­tion from SAP ECC to S/4HANA on-premis­es, or even pri­vate cloud, and then to incre­men­tal­ly also trans­form their old exten­sions to a state of cloud readi­ness. They do not need to migrate all those exten­sions, but the core busi­ness process­es — espe­cial­ly those which should also receive inno­va­tions in the future — should be migrat­ed towards ABAP Cloud to make sure that they are ready for the future. SAP cus­tomers can already do that in non-cloud envi­ron­ments. This is very impor­tant to under­stand, and we need to empha­size it repeatedly.

ASUG recent­ly spoke with Dr. Alexan­der Rother about Joule’s ABAP devel­op­er capa­bil­i­ties, which is the type of break­through that does­n’t hap­pen with­out a deep lev­el of col­lab­o­ra­tion between your team and oth­ers at SAP. What can you say about the col­lab­o­ra­tion between your team and espe­cial­ly those work­ing on the prod­uct devel­op­ment roadmap for SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form and SAP S/4HANA? 

We have a very tight col­lab­o­ra­tion with SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form and SAP S/4HANA. Of course, SAP S/4HANA is using ABAP; both SAP S/4HANA pri­vate and pub­lic cloud edi­tions are run­ning on ABAP, and they’ve done so suc­cess­ful­ly for mul­ti­ple years now. His­tor­i­cal­ly, R/3 ran on ABAP successfully.

Those appli­ca­tions built with­in SAP S/4HANA, which are built on the ABAP stack, are built with the ABAP Cloud devel­op­ment mod­el, mean­ing that they build their data mod­els with Core Data Ser­vices (CDS). They expose busi­ness objects with all data, for exam­ple, to be acces­si­ble via UI ser­vices or web API ser­vices and also are using those capa­bil­i­ties which are pro­vid­ed by ABAP Cloud, by hav­ing a declar­a­tive pro­gram­ming mod­el, to be inte­grat­ed into all the applications.

In dis­cussing side-by-side solu­tions, espe­cial­ly in SAP BTP, out­side of our cloud, you can also use the SAP Cloud Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming (CAP) mod­el. Inte­gra­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion of those pro­gram­ming mod­els is strong. We do every­thing we need to do to make sure that appli­ca­tions built with­in ABAP Cloud or built with­in CAP can inte­grate with each other.

We are also ensur­ing that CAP can access ABAP-based sys­tems; in ABAP, we also have a ser­vice-based con­sump­tion mod­el in place, which allows you to access dis­trib­uted data inde­pen­dent­ly, if they’re built on CAP and any oth­er appli­ca­tion stack, to make those inte­gra­tion sce­nar­ios pos­si­ble. Cus­tomers can carve out those sce­nar­ios to those stacks which are best for their use cases.

As you head into SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence this year, what else out­side of your pre­sen­ta­tions are you look­ing for­ward to on the ABAP front?

I can­not pre­dict any­thing, because I do not have any machine-learn­ing algo­rithms in my mind. [laughs]

Recent­ly, SAP deliv­ered Joule devel­op­er capa­bil­i­ties for ABAP, which helps appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers in SAP, as well as on the cus­tomer and part­ner side, to accel­er­ate their devel­op­ment process­es, to make sure that they can build appli­ca­tions very quick­ly. This just hit our cus­tomer sys­tems in Feb­ru­ary, so cus­tomers are now able to use those gen­er­a­tive AI capa­bil­i­ties to speed up the devel­op­ment process. I’m look­ing for­ward to get­ting first feed­back from cus­tomers, and to shape with our cus­tomers the future roadmap for those gen­er­a­tive AI capa­bil­i­ties with­in our ABAP Cloud devel­op­ment model. 

I’m plan­ning to have an influ­ence ses­sion, on Wednes­day of SAP Sap­phire, where we also dis­cuss, togeth­er with cus­tomers, the strat­e­gy on clean core exten­si­bil­i­ty, espe­cial­ly in the pri­vate cloud edi­tion, where we want to make sure we under­stand what road­blocks exist for cus­tomers to adapt ABAP Cloud, and how can we build AI-based fea­tures to accel­er­ate the devel­op­ment for our customers.

This is a core top­ic with­in 2025 right: mak­ing sure we incor­po­rate AI func­tion­al­i­ties, when it is pos­si­ble, in devel­op­ment process­es and with­in our pro­gram­ming mod­el to make busi­ness user sce­nar­ios even more effi­cient. We have a lot of top­ics in the pipeline, which are cur­rent­ly under imple­men­ta­tion, which are also com­ing this year, so stay tuned for that. I rec­om­mend attend­ing our roadmap ses­sion, because there we are going into detail on which AI-based fea­tures are just around the corner. 

Click here for more ABAP Cloud insights and ways to get involved, and read our Top Take­aways from the 2025 SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence.