Ear­li­er this week, SAP host­ed SAP TechEd, a vir­tu­al con­fer­ence geared towards SAP part­ners. The event fea­tured updates and announce­ments in the SAP part­ner ecosys­tem, includ­ing expand­ed low-code and no-code options, enhanced cloud capa­bil­i­ties, and a new free tier mod­el of the SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP).

In his keynote address, Juer­gen Mueller, CTO of SAP, laid out how SAP is work­ing to con­tin­ue enabling its part­ners and there­fore help its cus­tomers tack­le large-scale busi­ness chal­lenges. Mueller specif­i­cal­ly high­light­ed the need for busi­ness­es to scale dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, become car­bon-neu­tral enter­pris­es, man­age sup­ply chains, and lever­age to improve busi­ness processes. 

“Many lead­ers have real­ized how impor­tant it is that process­es with­in the com­pa­ny help peo­ple get their job done in the best pos­si­ble way,” he said dur­ing the keynote. 

Here are some of the key high­lights and events from SAP TechEd 2021. 

New Heights for Low-Code, No-Code 

There is no deny­ing that many orga­ni­za­tions are see­ing a short­age is skilled employ­ees nec­es­sary for suc­cess. In the 2021 Pulse of the SAP Cus­tomer sur­vey, we asked our mem­bers about their top tech­nol­o­gy chal­lenges. While the top two most pop­u­lar respons­es focused on chal­lenges with inte­gra­tions and upgrades, the third main chal­lenge was a lack of inter­nal skill to man­age products. 

A stag­ger­ing 41% of ASUG mem­bers said that they do not have enough skilled staff to keep up with chang­ing tech­nolo­gies, and 25% of respon­dents indi­cat­ed that more advanced and var­ied exper­tise is need­ed. This prob­lem is stretch­ing beyond the ASUG com­mu­ni­ty and SAP ecosys­tem. The Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Busi­ness Eco­nom­ics recent­ly report­ed that 47% of the respon­dents to its Busi­ness Con­di­tions Sur­vey report­ed a short­age of skilled work­ers in the third quar­ter of this year. 

With that in mind, SAP has been expand­ing its low-code, no-code capa­bil­i­ties, espe­cial­ly with the SAP BTP. Dur­ing his keynote, Mueller unveiled some new low-code, no-code updates to the SAP BTP that will not only help orga­ni­za­tions devel­op apps eas­i­er, but will also assist orga­ni­za­tions as they con­tin­ue inte­grat­ing their busi­ness processes. 

“Cit­i­zen and pro­fes­sion­al coders alike can now increase their pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and inno­vate at scale,” Mueller said. 

Three spe­cif­ic low-code, no-code solu­tions were announced dur­ing the SAP TechEd 2021 keynote. The first was the inclu­sion of SAP App­Gyver, a no-code app devel­op­ment plat­form that SAP recent­ly acquired, into the ecosys­tem. Mueller was joined by SAP App­Gyver Direc­tor and Team Lead Marko Lehti­ma­ki to dis­cuss how this devel­op­ment is ben­e­fi­cial to part­ners. Lehti­ma­ki not­ed that visu­al pro­gram­ming is ​“the next step in the evo­lu­tion of pro­gram­ming.” He also said that no-code has evolved beyond cre­at­ing ​“baby apps,” and can now be used to ​“cre­ate mis­sion-crit­i­cal, pix­el-per­fect solu­tions with­out any writ­ing of code.” 

SAP also unveiled the SAP Busi­ness Appli­ca­tion Stu­dio, where pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ers can ​“sup­port cit­i­zen devel­op­ers,” when it comes to build­ing solu­tions and inte­gra­tions in the SAP ecosys­tem. Final­ly, SAP also announced a new RPA-based no-code solu­tion called SAP Process Automation. 

“With this uni­fied low-code, no-code offer­ing, we’ve bridged the gap between pro­fes­sion­al and non-tech­ni­cal devel­op­ers,” Mueller said. 

Sim­pli­fy­ing Cloud Migrations

SAP TechEd 2021 also fea­tured a few announce­ments focused on cloud adop­tion, includ­ing SAP Busi­ness Ware­house (BW) Bridge. This solu­tion specif­i­cal­ly is set up to make the process of mov­ing into a pub­lic eas­i­er for cus­tomers. SAP BW Bridge allows SAP BW users to migrate their data from SAP BW to the SAP Data Ware­house solu­tion. This allows busi­ness­es to move their data into the cloud. 

“This is a big step for our cus­tomers,” David Was­com, senior vice pres­i­dent of exec­u­tive pro­grams at ASUG, said in an ana­lyst ses­sion imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the keynote address. Was­com not­ed that ASUG often hears from its mem­bers that one of the biggest bar­ri­ers to com­plet­ing a cloud migra­tion project is not hav­ing employ­ees with the skills required to make a project like this run smooth­ly and on time. This solu­tion will help cus­tomers make this jump with­out neces­si­tat­ing the deep tech­ni­cal skills and expe­ri­ence need­ed for such a project. Was­com also not­ed that the SAP BW Bridge also elim­i­nates a lot of the risk asso­ci­at­ed with cloud projects like this.