Amazing as it may seem, this fine day, 1st April 2023, the board of SAP SE have released a pop album which has instantly shot to number one position in every single country in the world.
Here is the album cover.
Who would have thought that every one of the managing board of a multi-national company all had such good singing voices? But they do, and so the original idea was that on the 50th anniversary of SAP’s existence last year an album with the eponymous title “SAP” would be released. The full name of the album is “SAP by VORSTAND ON THE RUN”
Sadly, nothing at SAP is ever released on time or under budget, so we had to wait till this year to enjoy the album.
I know all you out there in SDN world are going to buy this album anyway, making it the top selling album of all time, but in any event since I have been given an advance edition, I am going to do a review.
It is a little-known fact that before I became an ABAP Programmer, I was a writer for UK pop magazine SMASH HITS which won many literary awards for its in-depth analysis of the musical trends of the day. It was not taking the mickey, no no no, when they asked the singers in “Bananarama” if there was life on other planets that was a dead-set serious question. The journalist just wanted to know – is there or isn’t there? And who better to ask than Bananarama?
Play List
You may get a bit disappointed by this, but there are only ten songs on the album. The good news however is that every single one is a masterpiece. People said that about “Thriller” but this new album beats that old one into a cocked hat. They are all cover versions, because no concept in IT is ever new, but they are all vast improvements on the originals.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (1)
This song was originally written in 1933, but then covered by the pop group “The Hasso Plattners” in 1959, just before the lead singer left the pop industry to work for IBM.
The lyrics “Do do do, do do do, Do do do ahh” were later used a template for standard SAP error messages, as in telling the end user they need to do something to correct the erroneous situation, but do not tell them what.
Moves Like Jagger (2)
This song was originally sung by the USA pop group “Maroon UI5” back in 2010 for the film “Magic Mike”. Little did people know that Maroon UI5 were actually all SAP senior executives. Indeed the cast of “Magic Mike” was comprised entirely of SAP employees.
If anyone had looked closely there were two giveaway clues in the lyrics
In Memories (3)
This song was originally written for the musical “Cats” (1983). That musical was about a group of talking cats who were trying to invent an in-memory database, with a column store as opposed to a row store. It was a bit of a novel concept for a musical, but it went down well.
WOT? (4)
This was originally a song by CAP Sensible in 1983, in which various programmers tried to explain to him the concept of the “Cloud Application Programming Model” (hereafter CAP) and he had no idea what they were on about. Thus the lyrics went:
“He said CAP! I said WOT?”
“He said CAP! I said WOT?”
“He said CAP! I said WOT?”
“He said CAP! I said WOT?”
We BUILD This City (5)
This was originally a song by “Starship” in 1985. They correctly predicted that in 2023 SAP would rename every single one of its products, be it invented in-house or acquired, such that the word BUILD was included in the product name. If you think about it, that was quite a good guess, given the over thirty-year gap.
I am guilty here also, as I improved the lyrics to “We BUILD this City” some years back to refer to my SAP monster books as in:
“Who counts the Monsters, Underneath the Bed?
Who writes the stupid books for SAP PRESS?”
Datasphere (6)
This was a disco song by comedian Russ Abbot in 1985 from his album “I Love a Party”. It was all about the best way to integrate SAP data with non-SAP data thus forming a kind of “Business Warehouse” of information. He predicted that there would be several different versions of the product that did this, each one claiming that “Until today, accessing and using data located in disparate systems and locations – across cloud providers, data vendors and on-premise systems – has been a complex challenge” and the new version would solve that problem. He predicted the naming would change as follows over the years:
Here he is at an SAP conference with a fellow Data Warehouse specialist.
HANA-KEY in the UK (7)
This was originally a song by the “Seex Pistols” in 1976. After they managed to get a chat show host sacked by swearing non-stop on live TV and he could not stop them, they went on to sing a song about how one day there would be an ERP system called S/4HANA and you would need some sort of licence key to access it. Once again, a very accurate prediction.
Here is an extract from the lyrics:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha
There are many ways to get what you want
I use the best, well I use the rest
Well I use the ERP
I use HANA-KEY
I Fought AI – and AI won (8)
“I Fought The Law” was first recorded by The Crickets, on the album they completed after Buddy Holly's 1959 death in a plane crash at the age of just 22. It has been covered many times since then.
In the SAP version sung by the board members they introduce a clever twist. In this case they are alluding to the fact that their conversational AI products e.g., “Co-Pilot” got blown out of the water unexpectedly by the advent of ChatGPT and similar products, so SAP had to throw their product out of the window.
Dancing in the Spreadsheets (9)
Most people do not know this, but for over ten years now there has been a wonderful way to transmit data between SAP and EXCEL – it is called ABAP2XLSX.
By now you will have seen the pattern that pop groups in the past could correctly predict future events, especially in the IT world.
The song “Dancing in the Spreadsheets” was written by Marvin Gaye in 1964, well before even the idea of a spreadsheet had even been invented. So now, over fifty years later you would not expect nonsense blogs every month on SCN by someone saying they have re-invented to ABAP2XLSX wheel. But that is in fact what happens.
Changes (10)
"Changes" is a song by English singer-songwriter David Bowie, originally released on his 1971 album Hunky Dory. As with the other songwriters mentioned above, he was making a prediction about the future. In this case he was predicting that one day SAP would replace CL_GUI_ALV_GRID (where the end user could make changes to the data) with CL_SALV_TABLE (where the end user cannot).
Summary
As I may have mentioned earlier the entire board of SAP have truly wonderful singing voices, and this comes through clearly on this album, which I predict will be the best-selling album of all time.
Nothing ever in the history of the universe has ever come even close to being this good so I suggest that everyone reading this on the release date of the album – 01 April 2023 – should buy it as soon as they possibly can.
Cheersy Cheers
Paul
PS I can also tell you some songs were rejected e.g., a cover of “Panic” by the Smiths (1987), because SAP felt the lyrics at the end of that song would be disrespectful to one the top experts on the Cloud Application Programming Model.
If another such album was going to be made next year, could you please suggest some pertinent songs in the comments?
Here is the album cover.
SAP Pop Album Cover
Who would have thought that every one of the managing board of a multi-national company all had such good singing voices? But they do, and so the original idea was that on the 50th anniversary of SAP’s existence last year an album with the eponymous title “SAP” would be released. The full name of the album is “SAP by VORSTAND ON THE RUN”
Sadly, nothing at SAP is ever released on time or under budget, so we had to wait till this year to enjoy the album.
I know all you out there in SDN world are going to buy this album anyway, making it the top selling album of all time, but in any event since I have been given an advance edition, I am going to do a review.
It is a little-known fact that before I became an ABAP Programmer, I was a writer for UK pop magazine SMASH HITS which won many literary awards for its in-depth analysis of the musical trends of the day. It was not taking the mickey, no no no, when they asked the singers in “Bananarama” if there was life on other planets that was a dead-set serious question. The journalist just wanted to know – is there or isn’t there? And who better to ask than Bananarama?
Play List
You may get a bit disappointed by this, but there are only ten songs on the album. The good news however is that every single one is a masterpiece. People said that about “Thriller” but this new album beats that old one into a cocked hat. They are all cover versions, because no concept in IT is ever new, but they are all vast improvements on the originals.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (1)
This song was originally written in 1933, but then covered by the pop group “The Hasso Plattners” in 1959, just before the lead singer left the pop industry to work for IBM.
The lyrics “Do do do, do do do, Do do do ahh” were later used a template for standard SAP error messages, as in telling the end user they need to do something to correct the erroneous situation, but do not tell them what.
Moves Like Jagger (2)
This song was originally sung by the USA pop group “Maroon UI5” back in 2010 for the film “Magic Mike”. Little did people know that Maroon UI5 were actually all SAP senior executives. Indeed the cast of “Magic Mike” was comprised entirely of SAP employees.
If anyone had looked closely there were two giveaway clues in the lyrics
- But when you're with me / I'll make you believe / That I've got the SCCR key
- you wanna know how to make me smile / Take a GUI control, own me just for the night
In Memories (3)
This song was originally written for the musical “Cats” (1983). That musical was about a group of talking cats who were trying to invent an in-memory database, with a column store as opposed to a row store. It was a bit of a novel concept for a musical, but it went down well.
WOT? (4)
This was originally a song by CAP Sensible in 1983, in which various programmers tried to explain to him the concept of the “Cloud Application Programming Model” (hereafter CAP) and he had no idea what they were on about. Thus the lyrics went:
“He said CAP! I said WOT?”
“He said CAP! I said WOT?”
“He said CAP! I said WOT?”
“He said CAP! I said WOT?”
We BUILD This City (5)
This was originally a song by “Starship” in 1985. They correctly predicted that in 2023 SAP would rename every single one of its products, be it invented in-house or acquired, such that the word BUILD was included in the product name. If you think about it, that was quite a good guess, given the over thirty-year gap.
I am guilty here also, as I improved the lyrics to “We BUILD this City” some years back to refer to my SAP monster books as in:
“Who counts the Monsters, Underneath the Bed?
Who writes the stupid books for SAP PRESS?”
Datasphere (6)
This was a disco song by comedian Russ Abbot in 1985 from his album “I Love a Party”. It was all about the best way to integrate SAP data with non-SAP data thus forming a kind of “Business Warehouse” of information. He predicted that there would be several different versions of the product that did this, each one claiming that “Until today, accessing and using data located in disparate systems and locations – across cloud providers, data vendors and on-premise systems – has been a complex challenge” and the new version would solve that problem. He predicted the naming would change as follows over the years:
- BIW (Business Information Warehouse)
- BW
- Business Intelligence
- Corporate Information Factory
- BW (again)
- BW4HANA
- SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
- SAP Datasphere
Here he is at an SAP conference with a fellow Data Warehouse specialist.
Data Warehouse Experts
HANA-KEY in the UK (7)
This was originally a song by the “Seex Pistols” in 1976. After they managed to get a chat show host sacked by swearing non-stop on live TV and he could not stop them, they went on to sing a song about how one day there would be an ERP system called S/4HANA and you would need some sort of licence key to access it. Once again, a very accurate prediction.
Here is an extract from the lyrics:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha
There are many ways to get what you want
I use the best, well I use the rest
Well I use the ERP
I use HANA-KEY
I Fought AI – and AI won (8)
“I Fought The Law” was first recorded by The Crickets, on the album they completed after Buddy Holly's 1959 death in a plane crash at the age of just 22. It has been covered many times since then.
In the SAP version sung by the board members they introduce a clever twist. In this case they are alluding to the fact that their conversational AI products e.g., “Co-Pilot” got blown out of the water unexpectedly by the advent of ChatGPT and similar products, so SAP had to throw their product out of the window.
Dancing in the Spreadsheets (9)
Most people do not know this, but for over ten years now there has been a wonderful way to transmit data between SAP and EXCEL – it is called ABAP2XLSX.
By now you will have seen the pattern that pop groups in the past could correctly predict future events, especially in the IT world.
The song “Dancing in the Spreadsheets” was written by Marvin Gaye in 1964, well before even the idea of a spreadsheet had even been invented. So now, over fifty years later you would not expect nonsense blogs every month on SCN by someone saying they have re-invented to ABAP2XLSX wheel. But that is in fact what happens.
Changes (10)
"Changes" is a song by English singer-songwriter David Bowie, originally released on his 1971 album Hunky Dory. As with the other songwriters mentioned above, he was making a prediction about the future. In this case he was predicting that one day SAP would replace CL_GUI_ALV_GRID (where the end user could make changes to the data) with CL_SALV_TABLE (where the end user cannot).
Summary
As I may have mentioned earlier the entire board of SAP have truly wonderful singing voices, and this comes through clearly on this album, which I predict will be the best-selling album of all time.
Nothing ever in the history of the universe has ever come even close to being this good so I suggest that everyone reading this on the release date of the album – 01 April 2023 – should buy it as soon as they possibly can.
Cheersy Cheers
Paul
PS I can also tell you some songs were rejected e.g., a cover of “Panic” by the Smiths (1987), because SAP felt the lyrics at the end of that song would be disrespectful to one the top experts on the Cloud Application Programming Model.
If another such album was going to be made next year, could you please suggest some pertinent songs in the comments?
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