Are You There, SAP? It’s Us, Developers

[Jelena]

Folks,

Several years and executive shuffles ago, we heard a strategic message from SAP: developers are kind of important. It manifested itself in a variety of ways: the keynotes where the charismatic former CTO was coding live on stage, special developer passes to TechEd, the creation of Developer space on sap.com, ABAP development trial becoming widely available, etc.

The advancements in Cloud infrastructure, open source development transforming from quaint grassroots movement into mainstream, and necessity to utilize other languages than ABAP (gasp!) created the “perfect storm” not only to shake-up the SAP development world but for many other developers to enter SAP ecosystem. Heck, even to me the idea of creating the Angry Birds equivalent of the enterprise world in Cloud and then retiring early seems very appealing.

The first step for the potential SAP Angry Birds creator would be to learn and start using SAP Cloud Platform (SCP). For that, they could use free 30-day trial account that can be later extended 2 more times to 90 days total. This appears very generous of SAP but only until we look at how it actually works and how it compares to the competition.

Fellow SAP Mentor Alum tobias.hofmann explained the issue with SCP trial very well in his recent blog post. I encourage everyone to read it in its entirety but my TLDR version is: after 90 days, your development gets deleted; the trial account is a “dead end” that does not easily extend to the paid tier.

By comparison, the providers like Amazon, Oracle, and even IBM offer a free tier of their services. Unlike a trial account, free tier (a) never expires, meaning you don’t have to worry about the trial counter ticking; (b) if your SAP Angry Birds app takes off, you can easily expand to the paid tier or even just add additional paid services a la carte.

What Do Others Offer?

After reading Tobias’s blog, I went to investigate the free tier offerings. By using Google with “<name> free tier”, I found the corresponding web pages for Amazon AWS, Oracle, and IBM Cloud very easily. The information checked out: all free tiers were not limited by time and easily upgradeable with paid services or higher, paid tiers, if necessary.

Since IBM already has my personal information anyway, I went all the way and registered a Lite (free tier) account there. For a company that is casually criticized for being slow and old-fashioned, I have to say it was unexpectedly simple and easy process. I entered my name and email address, received a confirmation email, and in less than a minute had this:

Oracle was a bit more needy, wanting my cell phone and, for some reason, payment information upfront. Amazon required only email and phone for personal account.

What do we get from SAP? Top link in Google search is a 9-step tutorial that, among other steps, includes registration of 2 separate accounts and “Understand trial counter” step.

Sorry to say but it is embarrassing.

What’s The Big Deal?

One might say, “but you can just keep extending the trial over and over, so what’s the big deal?” Well, if it’s so easy to extend the trial perpetually then why does it even exist? Why is it not a permanent free tier? Why do the developers have to deal with the risk of losing their work? I’ve been an SAP developer for 15 years and I have no plans to leave. Relationship with SAP is not a “trial” of anything for me. It's discouraging to see SAP having commitment issues when it comes to our partnership .

Also, the nature of “trial” suggests that it’s “try before you buy” option for someone who is interested in purchasing full product but is unsure about decision. If this is the goal of SAP SCP trial account, then, as Tobias points out in his blog, it is not actually set up like that.

History Lesson

While randomly browsing Reddit, I stumbled upon animated infographics showing how the mobile OS market share changed over time. It caught my attention that Symbian, the name I haven’t even heard before, once held almost 40% market share and then quickly faded into oblivion. I went to read more about it out of curiosity. This OS was used by Nokia and Sony Ericson phones that also practically disappeared for a variety of reasons, but this passage on Wikipedia sounded chillingly familiar:

"Despite its sizable market share then, Symbian was at various stages difficult to develop for: First [...] due to the complexity of then the only native programming languages [...]; then the obstinate developer bureaucracy, along with high prices of various IDEs and SDKs, which were prohibitive for independent or very small developers; and then the subsequent fragmentation[...]. All of this discouraged third-party developers, and served to cause the native app ecosystem for Symbian not to evolve to a scale later reached by Apple's App Store or Android's Google Play."

Without the applications, without the support from the wide developer community, SAP platform is destined to become Symbian of the enterprise software world. If SAP is indeed serious about the developer relationships, it is time to commit and “put a ring on it” with not a trial but a permanent free tier of the Cloud Platform.

P.S. Related reading / viewing / listening:
Diginomica article Why SAP Developers Can't Have Nice Things by dahowlett
LinkedIn discussion
Twitter discussion
Live conversation with Dennis and matt.steiner on YouTube
Coffee Corner radio podcast with Matthias, Tobias, and 68fdcfd7801242baafce4e6cd1b5d218

[vbalko-claimate]

Nice and compact article about common divergence between what SAP says and what it does. But despite the situation on Cloud foundry account - I have to say, that it is much better than it was during "on premise time".

But that doesnt mean, that it couldnt be better.

One remark - is it coincidence or why I read about that problem on a 3rd place today (twitter, blog.sap, and sap community) and I have never found such article before? Also Sygizmundovich, DJ Adams and other heavy weights (including you of course) are actively discussing that topic today.

[Michael_Keller]

The general availability and easy accessibility of a development environment including test environment is absolutely necessary!

A short report from my work with students: Students often have access to a development system as part of their studies. They will then get to know ABAP by taking part in a course. Outside of this framework, so to say at home, it's difficult for anyone to get started with ABAP development. This is not only a shame, it's even dangerous. Students are then very quickly working on other development topics.

Not only Symbian is an interesting example. IT history is full of it. This has been shown in the case of game consoles, for example: poor support for developers equates to no or poor games for a console and therefore no market. As far as I can remember, SEGA made some notable mistakes.

 

[rsletta]

Thanks jelena.perfiljeva2, for chiming in on one of the subjects closest to my heart at the moment. As I brought up during the panel discussion at SAP Online Track, developer adoption is a vital part of platform success. And as long as selecting one of the other platforms is more viable, more of potensial SAP business will go there. There's no question about it.

I can also add that we ran SAP Online Track on a combination of Github Pages for the static website, and Azure for the infrastucture used to facilitate the streaming from Discord.

For the "secret" project we are now working on, we are using Google Firebase. I've been considering refactoring it to make it platform independent, but for the moment that would only mean to transition it to Azure, AWS, Azure, or one of the other platforms catering to small developer projects. I would love to be able to host it on SAP Cloud Platform, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[Jelena]

Thanks for the comment! I swear there is no conspiracy among the "heavyweights" 🙂 (at least not that I'm aware of) but this has been an issue for a long time and no wonder it's boiling over.

[vbalko-claimate]

I like to hear (read), that it`s not a conspiracy. One more conspiracy and it would be too much - with all that aliens abducting people, goverments and pharma gigants spreading corona, airplanes pouring chemicals on us and so on.

My life is at normal once more... 🙂

[Former Member]

Hi Jelena,

Thank you for doing the cloud devops UX comparison for the benefit of the whole community.

at the risk of being misunderstood by either fellow SAPpers or SAP themselves i feel like i need to play a little bit of a devil's advocate here.

i have been using AWS for quite some time, maybe 5 years, and i did try IBM Cloud for a couple of months some 2 or 3 years ago. never knowingly tried Azure, GCP or Oracle Cloud and have no immediate plans to do so.

i'm with you about offering the free trial tier and i would definitely embrace it. who wouldn't want free, right? that also includes our time spent testing all those goodies in the toolbox or sandbox from the cloud providers' POV.

but, here is what i still find appealing about the expiring trial account on SCP.

1. keeping my code clean and local as it may become deprecated when your account finally expires.
2. upon expiration, i will be getting a brand new, latest and greatest (within reason) cloud platform from SAP.
3. once the account expires the deal is off, for both parties.
4. SAP have never asked for my payment details and have so far been paying for my pass-through AWS instances, procured in the background.
5. AWS keeps my other little instances which unfortunately do not fit the free tier, so i end up paying for them, only as a backup to keep cloud current
6. the suspense of not being sure that when the next 90-day quarter starts my entitlements, space allocations, subscriptions, services, and the out-of-the box sample SAP code are still available the same way as before the deletion. - ok. this is not really a benefit, but i can always come back here and complain, right?

again, i like what i see on SCP, wish every fellow SAPper as many free tiers as possible, but i don't see how i can limit myself to just one cloud provider.

happy cloud devopsing everyone out there!

greg

[Former Member]

didn't Windows 'kill' Symbian?

i'm, for one, a happy Nokia android cost-conscious consumer but

it ain't cool.

[mmcisme1]

I know it's one of the things that I think is kind of weird.  You have an account that expires over and over again.   Not sure what the theory is behind that.  Maybe it's some great marketing that I don't understand.   Very strange!

But hey, at least we get something, right?  It wasn't so long ago when we had no where to go play 😞

The statistics are very interesting.

On the up side - it's nice to see you back and in action.

[z_brandon]

Thanks for brilliant blog post jelena.perfiljeva2 ! I read Tobias’ article yesterday and both his words and yours ring very true. A few of my colleagues have said the 90 day trial period shouldn’t matter if your SCP apps are on Git which is a fair point. But I know what a faff it was to get my home full stack Development environment setup and to have to redo that every 90 days is going to be a real pain!

[Jelena]

Thanks for the comment, Greg! I suspect that every service (especially free tier) is not perfect but that's not really what this is about.

The way I understand your comment, you like an option of your stuff actually being dropped at 90 days so that you can start all fresh with latest and greatest. That doesn't seem to contradict the free tier idea as I'd expect that, just like any tier, to have some account close or refresh option.

It'd probably also be reasonable to impose some limitations on inactive accounts. If there is no activity whatsoever for a reasonable time (not 90 days, more like 6 months) then the account can be either closed or made dormant. This doesn't contradict the request in this blog either, so you might not be as much on the devil's side as you think. 🙂

[Jelena]

Thanks for the comment, Brandon!

If it can be extended perpetually then it's no longer a "trial". I rest my case. 🙂

[Jelena]

"At least we have something" - this just shows the low standards and self-esteem of the SAP developer community. 🙂 We deserve more than that!

Thanks for the comment!

[rasjoshi]

I echo with you.

BR,

Rashmi

[Michael_Keller]

Brilliant conclusion!

[Michael_Keller]

You're right. If we want to inspire new people to develop with ABAP and to keep existing developers, then we have to use all possibilities!

A technology-oriented community needs strong technology. We got it thanks to SAP (thanks again for HANA and your courage)! 🙂

But technology has to be accessible in order to be able to experience it. People can best get an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of a technology through their own experience.

[Michael_Keller]

Every child needs a playground to be able to play with other children 🙂

[AB]

I've got to say - I wish I had your gift for words!

As I've mentioned on other social media, the trial isn't just for rusted on SAPLings. People from outside the SAPosphere look to the trial to evaluate offerings - and give up.

 

 

[DG]

Hi Jelena,

I would agree it would be nice to extend the free trial. or just give option to use the tool for a small fee in a simple that could offset some of the price of running the service.

In Azure you get 2-300 USD for a free trial, maybe that would also be an option. And I would prefer not to need to interact with an account rep for it.

 

[mmcisme1]

But isn't that a double edge sword.  You only get what you deserve?  I'm smiling as I type this.  I've been philosophical lately.  That's an interesting proverb.

Seriously, true, I do think we deserve better.  😉

[mmcisme1]

Sigh.  Live in the US.  Our playground options have been shrinking as old fun toys are no longer deemed safe.   I miss a lot of the huge slides and climbing swilling things.  And now with Covid - I haven't been by to see if they are even allowed on the playground.

I wonder if we can draw some parallels here?  Limits on us because it is not safe?

[GQ2]

Great points. The community has always been locked in to basically current active developers working for large enterprise customers. Even with the various free offerings there has been a lack of useful data and applications which further weaken the offering.

 

Perhaps with further dedication to multi-tenant clouds this will become more possible.

I think SalesForce is a great example with their sandboxes.

[mmcisme1]

For those of you like myself.  I guess I should pay more attention to Twitter.   They are on it!

Good news for all of us.

[Jelena]

Thanks for the comment, Daniel! When checking Amazon's offerings, I've noticed they have free tier and, on top of that, offer N amount of money to spend on their paid services. That seems like a great model and definitely makes one feel invited and included.

Agree on not dealing with account rep, that's ridiculous.

[Jelena]

Thanks for the comment, Gavin! I keep hearing of SalesForce brought up as a great example of training / sandbox offerings. SAP would be wise to catch up to that competition.

[Jelena]

Thanks for the comment! You're exactly right, this is not just good things for ABAPers (even though we deserve this for all the suffering 🙂 ), it's about expanding the ecosystem.

[felipe_dimmu23]

Is there a place to sign below? Can I sign it twice?

Once for the long “on premise” period where I never had a PC powerful enough to have the developer AS ABAP NetWeaver edition and now once again for the cloud platform.

It is true that, in the ancient ages of no cloud (5, 10 years ago?) the topic was a bit difficult to tackle, but today it seems like a legacy strategy that needs reviewing.

Take my example, I have recently moved to a very strict organization where I really don’t have the option to try out things as I will. And I really want to try things out using SCP. I even have personal projects I need to maintain. With an indefinite contract and 90 days trial, it simply doesn’t work…

And it takes more than 90 days to meet offer and demand together. I’m not even sure 90 days is enough to migrate the traditional ABAPer from on promise to the cloud methodology. SAP expecting its customers to bare those costs is just SAP trusting the status quo not to be challenged.

SAP expects to meet the demand for “the Cloud” alone. It cannot!  Such as in Symbian’s and SEGA’s examples, it takes developers to buy in for the ecosystem to mature and grow. And, specially today, it takes more than smooth sales talk for a developer to pay money so he can experiment.

Very, very interested in this. What can we do to support this vision?

[GrahamRobbo]

I know I am repeating myself but - it is impossible not to like Jelena.

Cheers

Graham Robbo

[joachimrees1]

I read about here and so far no where else.

But I drew inspiration from you comment and also took it to the Fediverse: https://mastodon.technology/@Joachim_Rees/104873215243183606

best
Joachim

 

 

[joachimrees1]

Hey Jelena,

thanks for you article and also for linking Tobias', which I now read, too.
My thought was something like: "yes, this (asking to be payed, always), is how SAP has always worked".

As Tobias puts it:

"Sometimes I have the impression that SAP Cloud is tailored to serve SAP sales more than customers."

I'd say: yes, this is the case.
I see the problem you outline with "not easily on boarding new, non-sap (or non-money-spending) developers" and I'm sure, SAP sees that, too.
But I think they don't care, it's intentionally designed that way!

best
Joachim

(PS: Not sure if it's widely known, but it surely is no secret: SAP Partners are paying to develop on and for SCP, too).

[JuerMueller]

Thanks for your blog post, Jelena, and all the comments.

We are definitely listening and taking your feedback seriously. Especially about this topic, we realize how important it is for you, our developer community. That’s why we have been working on it already to be able to offer a free tier of our SAP Cloud Platform as quickly as possible.

Stay tuned!

All the Best and thanks for being such an active community,
Juergen

[hardyp180]

Jelena asked … are you there … obviously yes you are. That is fantastic!

[former_member187780]

Hi keller.m, how easy it is to inspire someone to develop with ABAP (without ABAP background)? Aren’t the new generation of developers more “cloud-native” and more “cutting-edge” (hype) technologies oriented?

I totally agree with you, that technology has to be accessible, so anyone could experiment with it and have opinion for which areas this technology is good at for which it’s not that great.

By saying that, I can share with you one technology that I’m excited about: https://www.dirigible.io

and also Eclipse Dirigible – SAP’s Open Source Project for Low-Code Development ?

[Michael_Keller]

Thanks for the note! I watch the "Low-Code/No-Code"-movement for a while. Let's see what the future brings 🙂

[Former Member]

What can I say?

First of all, thanks a lot Jelena for your great (and, as it looks by now, influential) post!

And of course thanks for the response of Juergen Mueller which I take as a promise.

Let's just hope that 'as quickly as possible' means ...ehm...quick.
That is, by SAP standards, still in 2020. Sorry, couldn't help it:)

Cheers
Kai

[Devraj]

Thank you Jelena for raising this very important issue and Juergen for stepping up Neo Free Tier was one of the best we have had and having a SCP CF free tier (not a 90 day limited that needs to be extended every 30 days). We really need this to drive traction among developers who want to keep current, test, write blogs and basically spread the good word.

I know how much the Neo Free Tier helped me and my team and I am sure there are several others who need that for CF going forward.

Should we start a countdown to the announcement (hint: TechED 2020 keynote)?

 

[Former Member]

Re-reading Jelena's post, I'd like to draw attention to this part:

 

What do we get from SAP? Top link in Google search is a 9-step tutorial that, among other steps, includes registration of 2 separate accounts and “Understand trial counter” step.



Sorry to say but it is embarrassing.

 

I think this point is important as well:

What is putting people off from SAP ist not only the lack of a free tier but also the complexity of the registration processes. Not only when SCP is concerned but nearly always.

I really don't understand why SAP has to make the processes so complicated. Especially when you look at Google or Amazon where it is so much easier and intuitive.

Regards
Kai

[pjcools]

Thanks jelena.perfiljeva2 for writing this - it is definitely a good discussion to have and as with anything there are always improvements to be made. Brilliant that juergen.mueller is looking into this - great!. There has been signifcant improvements already to the trial accounts over time and I disagree with some comments stating that there is no free trial. This also needs to be covered to provide a balanced view on the situation. There is one and has been for longer than I remember - especially SAP Cloud Platform trial accounts. But this also extends to recent SAP HANA Cloud free trials, SAP Analytics Cloud free trials etc not to mention all of the great content coming through openSAP. 25 years ago this did not exist but we made do.

Also not saying because we have something we should not look for improvements - most of what I do on a daily basis is improving the lives of people through great user experiences so whatever we can do to improve the user experience of developers I am +1 on that!

My views are a bit different than what you and others have covered here (so they may be unpopular but that is ok as I am entitled to my opinion 🙂 ) and as a regular daily user of SAP Cloud Platform (for 5+ years) I believe I have the experience to provide some more insight into this. I don't think the registration process is complex at all and the 9 steps detailed in your blog include other information such as Region selection as well as navigating around the platform and covering elements like Spaces and the trial counter so it is not really 9 steps to sign up. Some of the process steps are necessary as part of Multi factor authentication options which I think are pretty normal in these times. As I often say, come to me with solutions rather than problems - what would your onboarding process look like? Maybe we can schedule an unconference session in December to talk more about this.

If I was to compare this to TV subscriptions such as Netflix, Apple TV, Disney +, Amazon Prime - they all offer a free trial option (some better than others) but I don't really hear alot of negative comments - people just sign up and move on. While the trial accounts need to be restarted every 30 days and have a 90 day overall validity period the fact this is free is still good. Additionally, there is an indicator that details how many days are left - at least providing a visual to the developer on when the account will be suspended.

Let me detail some basics that I have experienced over the years that may or may not explain why the 90 day trial account to me makes a little sense - annoying sometimes but when I weigh everything up I can sort of understand it.

Here goes:

• From a Cloud Foundry perspective there are so many innovations going on and significant changes being made on a regular basis so the support processes required to maintain and support thousands of trial accounts on all different versions would be near impossible. How this worked on Neo was mind boggling but SAP probably had more control over this given it was running on SAP hardware. Controlling this on other hyperscalers may be more difficult, not sure?


• The changes to the account on a regular basis are major and for the most part the updates are to the betterment of the developer experience. For instance, my CF trial account expired recently and when I renewed again all of the entitlements were automatically provisioned. I did post this on Twitter at the time as I thought it was a massive time saver and great idea. Previously users had to manually go and assign entitlements depending on what they wanted to use. So, if I had a choice about keeping my trial account forever versus getting a new shiny box all of the time that had all of the new functions in it - I would choose the latter everytime.


• Signing up to accounts on Google Cloud or Azure are way more complex than signing up to an account on SCP - Cloud Foundry IMO. I am technically savvy but the Google cloud set up is a mine field - especially working through the free tier options. I've had to email a number of times to clarify charges on my account as I had no idea what the charges were for - way too complex. So overall I disagree that the process of signing up is difficult - I think it is much easier than others to be fair but as said above it can be improved like everything else.


• Major service changes are taking place - for instance the Business Rules and Workflow services recently have become part of Workflow Management. If I had an older trial account how would the old services work together with the new services? This is handled easily now because once the new trial account is created it will include all of the new services so there is no need to upgrade nor any conflicts due to old services hanging around. This is also a great way of knowing what is NEW in the platform rather than them all mixing together and then having to work out what is old versus what is new.


• I view it positively in that I can redo developer tutorials on the new Trial account which cements my knowledge. Usually changes or updates have taken place so it is also a good chance to refresh my knowledge.

These are just some of the reasons - but I guess what I am saying here is that it is complex and I feel sometimes we expect perfection in everything and sometimes this is just unattainable. Yes, you heard it hear first :-). But, I agree overall with the sentiments - if we can improve this situation then definitely would be a great outcome for developers and I would be interested to see what additional benefits this provided and what developers could come up with?

This is the interesting point for me - what could developers do with an never ending trial account as opposed to what they can do now?  Compelling to know and measure....

At the end of the day this is possibly down to cost. The new cloud ways of working means that developers can spin boxes up and down so if trial accounts ran forever then the cost would possibly be prohibitive. I know myself I am not always using my trial account so why would a box be sitting there spinning when I am not using this - also talks to sustainability, like leaving lights on all of the time - there is a cost here - environmentally as well.

Anyway, good discussion and good that these points are raised!

 

Kind Regards

Phil Cooley

 

[Former Member]

Long answer. And I disagree with you here and there. Just picked some points at random:

… I disagree with some comments stating that there is no free trial…

Juergen Mueller acknowledges it in his response. So one of you has to be wrong.

…But this also extends to recent SAP HANA Cloud free trials, SAP Analytics Cloud free trials etc not to mention all of the great content coming through openSAP. 25 years ago this did not exist but we made do…

A lot of things didn’t exist 25 years ago, smart phones or Windows XP for example.
Arguing ‘SAP is less dreadful than a quarter of a century ago so be happy!’ ist a very SAP-ish way of seeing it:)

…most of what I do on a daily basis is improving the lives of people through great user experiences…

Well, that is the thing with SAP: Claiming to create ‘great user experience’ no matter what they do without asking the customers on this.
Shocking news for you: My user experience is not always that great with SAP.

…I don’t think the registration process is complex at all…If I was to compare this to TV subscriptions such as Netflix, Apple TV, Disney +, Amazon Prime – they all offer a free trial option … but I don’t really hear alot of negative comments…

That is because it is so much easier than the SAP processes.

…Let me detail some basics that I have experienced over the years that may or may not explain why the 90 day trial account to me makes a little sense…

…So, if I had a choice about keeping my trial account forever versus getting a new shiny box all of the time that had all of the new functions in it – I would choose the latter everytime…

Just picking one point here. This was already mentioned above as a plus.
But as I understood it SAP is marketing SCP to customers as something that is always updated in the background so you don’t need technical upgrades anymore.
So why do we as developers have to restart it every 90 days to have an update?

…This is the interesting point for me – what could developers do with an never ending trial account as opposed to what they can do now? Compelling to know and measure…

Please re-read Jelena’s post on this (Angry Birds and so).

…At the end of the day this is possibly down to cost…

Definitely.
And SAP is making billions.
And it should be more than happy for any developer ready to go the (long) way to S/4 HANA.
I mean, SAP already had to scrap the 2025 deadline (nothing less than a capitulation IMO).
If they want to keep the 2028 date they would be well-advised to keep the well-minded developers on board.
Even it costs a few bucks.

As I said: Just a few points that grabbed my attention.

Kind regards
Kai

[Jelena]

Thanks for spreading the word, Joachim, and good to see you around!

[Jelena]

Thanks for the comment! I agree, it seems like such a convoluted process. One would think that after explaining the process of creating two accounts in every related openSAP course and tutorial someone should say "hey, wait a minute, why are we doing all this and can't it be simplified?". Yet it persists. That's just mind-boggling.

[Jelena]

Ah, the real devil's advocate! 🙂 Thanks for the comment, Phil! And it's certainly is OK to disagree, that's what the comments are for, to discuss different POVs.

I'm not sure who made a comment there is no free trial, don't see anything like this in the comments, so a bit confused by the statement. There is free trial but there is no free tier, as noted in the blog.

It's a bit of a long post to reply in detail, so I also have to pick just the specific points to respond.

1. Comparing SCP to streaming services is just not valid IMHO. I don't develop anything on Netflix, so if trial ends I have nothing to lose (by the way, even Netflix keeps my list and other info for many months, in case I come back later, I use it on and off all the time). And if I want to remain paid subscriber then I don't need to change anything. Not the case with SCP trial, which was explained by Tobias and noted in my blog. Also, as I said in another reply above, if it can be extended indefinitely, it's simply no longer a trial.


2. Re: it's not perfect but works OK and is not that hard to use for me who's been around SAP for years. Valid point and I also definitely have no problem with 2 accounts because, hey, I already had one of them for years. Many things in SAP world are OK when you get used to them. But I'm not just speaking for myself in this blog. Try to look at this from the perspective of a non-SAP developer or a newcomer. This was also part of my blog: SAP claims they want to broaden the ecosystem, invite other developers to create apps and what's not but then the actions don't match that claim. What's the deal?

Regarding cost and all: how are others doing it? As pointed in the blog, many big players offer free tier, it's not something we're just asking unreasonably. How do they resolve those issues? It's time to look at that to find a solution instead of keep coming up with excuses.

[cyclingfisch_]

Great discussion here!

I just want to add one point to the cost discussion:

With the current model of the SAP Trial it's a one way street with a dead end. Devs can only use it to learn stuff. It will never be the place where the next big projects starts as a side project. Therefore SAP is never able to turn the costs for the trial offering into revenue. Developers who are looking for a platform for this kind of projects will go to the competition. If the side project becomes a bigger project or even a product, the technology decision is already made and SAP was not even considered. So SAP lost not only developers in their ecospace but also money without knowing it. The sales representive will not get informed about this project.

Things changed a lot with the rise of cloud computing. Not only the way we develop software, but also how technology decisions in projects are taken and also how sales works!

[former_member596519]

Yes, good to know that SAP cares about us, developers!

 

BR,

Aleks

[Jelena]

Regarding today’s SAP announcement that trial period has been extended to 365 days.

While this is good news, I want to make it perfectly clear that “free trial” is fundamentally different that “free tier” (the difference is explained quite clearly in Tobias’s blog I referenced). Free tier is what this blog and others have been advocating for, not merely a longer trial.

The trial extension is far from “mission accomplished”. While celebrating this step, let’s not forget that this is not the end of the journey. And, quite frankly, this step is rather sideways than forward.

Corresponding post on LI

For discussion on Twitter, follow me here

[Jelena]

You're exactly right, Martin, and that's why a longer trial is not a solution. Free tier with an option to expand is the way to go and the competition is already way ahead of SAP there.

[Former Member]

First of all, thanks to you for the extension which is a result of your post, I’d say!
Great example that posts can have an impact.

And of course thanks to SAP and Jürgen Müller for listening!

But then I couldn’t agree more with:

And, quite frankly, this step is rather sideways than forward.

Extension is nice but it doesn’t solve the core of the problem. It’s not only the missing free tier but also the lack of progress regarding the ABAP possibilites in general i. e. the lack of progress with Steampunk. Or did I miss something? Since

https://blogs.sap.com/2019/08/20/its-steampunk-now/

I haven’t read anything substantial but maybe I’m wrong?

Thanks for letting me know
Kai

[Jelena]

Thanks for the comment!

Steampunk these day goes by the boring name "SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment". This blog is from 2020, has lots of info: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/03/20/getting-started-with-abap-in-the-cloud-part-i/

Not sure about the specific progress there but maybe you could ask in that blog? Or reach out to the SAP people mentioned there.

Good luck! 🙂

[Former Member]

Thanks!

[Former Member]

Symbian had more than 70% market share and don’t tell me you don’t know Nokia Symbian reigned supreme for a decade before Android and iOS took over. It was Nokia who had globally 40% market share in Q4 2006. And If you never heard Symbian before it was because it was never highlighted or marketed as Symbian and was ubiquitous with Nokia smartphones. All Nokia smartphones N series, E series, mass market smartphones were based on S60 that was based on Symbian and S60 platform was marketed to developers. Literally all Nokia smartphones from the Nokia 7650 in 2002 to the last Nokia 808 Pure view in 2012 were Symbian based.

• The reason for writing all this is not to give you historical information but you may have understood what I mean it is the marketing and confusion that SAP also loves creating.

Yeah Symbian C++ had it’s issues it was tough unlike today’s languages like Swift and even Java who take care of so many things that the developer takes for granted today but that did not kill Symbian. They even had Qt and QML. The strategy blanket killed it! And more over enterprise software doesn’t disappear overnight, it’s not a USD 600 device

• Of course having free trial would be great but even better would be providing a cool standalone IDE kit either make the ADT great or just refine GUI but no curry, remove the confusion around so many different programming models and just stick to one and just refine it and help us work. It’s very hard to trust and invest because SAP keeps on flipping and that is the reason many customers and developers do not want to adopt the latest from SAP.

If developers see value they will join your ecosystem no matter what they learnt in college and irrespective of the training cost well of course if it costs a kidney no one will come near it but I am sure SAP is not that mad!

[Jelena]

Thanks for the comment.

I'm confused what "cool standalone IDE" has to do with the subject of this blog. IDE (any of them) and Cloud platform are completely different things.

Personally, I have no confusion regarding programming models (although if SAP would settle on the names, that would be great). But I agree that proliferation of them makes upskilling difficult for the developers. When something is introduced within SAP, it usually never goes away, so we end up dragging all the baggage with us for eternity. The challenge for developers is that not only we have to constantly keep up with changes but also we still need to know all the old stuff, all the way back to 1970s. Unless you're lucky to work exclusively for net new SAP customers with no legacy code whatsoever.

"If developers see value" - well, that's exactly what this blog is about. It's hard to see value when you start developing something but then can't easily scale it up for commercial use or, worse, lose your development altogether if you go over trial term.