I had an opportunity to attend SAP TechEd in Berlin this year. The conference took place October 27-29 and brought together the SAP community for three days of presentations, hands-on sessions, discussions, and networking. Here are my main takeaways.
Joule, Joule Everywhere
There are now probably more different solutions under the Joule brand than there are JavaScript frameworks. Keeping track of what does what is becoming a task in itself.
Joule Studio, the “development solution for building and running […]AI agents and workflows” is definitely something worth learning about and exploring, particularly as agent development becomes a more prominent part of the SAP ecosystem. At the event, SAP offered a free certification exam voucher that can be claimed on the product page.
On the other hand, I’m not so sure about Joule Work, which received quite a bit of attention at the event. It’s positioned as a convenient “AI workspace for every team to do their best work”. The problem is that enterprise employees already have their established working environments, heavily centered around Microsoft products. Introducing yet another workspace might be more of a nuisance than a convenience.
I suspect the biggest winners in this space will be solutions that integrate naturally with the tools people already use and the workflows that already work for them, rather than those that ask everyone to learn and adopt another environment.
There is also another assumption behind some of the Joule (and now n8n) messaging: that business users will increasingly take on rather technical activities, such as creating and managing AI agents. We’ve heard variations of this idea for years. Yet, despite the availability of various tools, I’m still not seeing it happen at scale. Case in point: Key User Extensibility app that is used by anyone except “key users” it was supposedly designed for.
Of course, there are exceptions. Some business users are genuinely interested in building their own solutions and automations. But I wouldn’t confuse those enthusiasts with a mass movement. Business folks have their own jobs to do.
Future of SAP Development
There were surprisingly many sessions around ABAP development this year, most centered about addition of AI features here and there. However, the broader development community has already been making way more progress on this front and SAP catching up frankly wasn’t something worth spending time.
At the event, I spoke with quite a few SAP developers, including prominent Community members. There was a surprising amount of agreement on a few points:
- Every developer should learn to use at least some AI tools. It’s here, folks, get used to it (and use it!).
- Developers whose only contribution is writing code to an exact specification will likely find themselves in a difficult position. AI can increasingly take over that part of the job and developers need to bring more to the table.
- Letting an AI agent simply push the code out is not a great idea. Developers need to remain in control of what gets generated and take responsibility for the outcome.
One concern that came up in almost every conversation was the future of junior developers.
If AI takes over more of the entry-level coding tasks, where will new developers get the experience they need? The SAP ecosystem already has an aging developer population problem, and the pipeline of people gaining practical experience is not something we can simply take for granted.
If I were a CIO, I’d start thinking about this sooner rather than later. The consequences of not developing the next generation of technical talent might not be immediately visible, but will become a serious problem down the road.
Community Sessions
One thing I wish SAP TechEd had offered more of was practical examples of technology solving actual business problems. There were certainly use cases in the keynotes and regular sessions, but, in my opinion, many of them remained rather weak or unrealistic. There were also surprisingly few sessions presented by actual customers.
On a more positive note, the Community sessions were among the most valuable parts of the event for me. The topics covered a broad range of subjects, from ABAP development to governance, security, and various AI use cases.
One session that stood out was Alisdair Templeton’s “Why Your AI Should Care About Code.” It touched on some important subjects around software development that go well beyond any particular vendor or technology stack. This is exactly the kind of discussion I wish had received more airtime at the conference.
Another session worth mentioning was Edgar Martinez’s “Zero Token Architecture for Joule Agents.” All the fancy AI capabilities are fine and dandy, but there is a practical question that comes with them: how much does it actually cost to run all these agents?
Final Thoughts
The question of cost was in the air throughout many of the SAP sessions. SAP did issue a clarification about “AI units” but that seems like just the beginning of a longer conversation.
Beyond all the announcements, SAP Cloud ALM was another technology worth watching. Its presence across very many sessions suggests that it might be evolving into something bigger than “SolMan for the Cloud”.
If you couldn’t make it to Berlin, some of the session recordings and slides are available online for free. For the Integration Suite enthusiasts, I can recommend session IN208. And the architects might be interested in the latest news about LeanIX (ST101), Signavio (AD104), and Business Data Cloud (ST200).