From Enterprise Resource Planning to Low-Code/No-Code Application Development

For sure you’ve heard about “low-code/no-code”, as both analysts and the media are putting a lot of emphasis on this topic at the moment. As an example, you may have read a Gartner statement released in February this year, where Gartner expects that worldwide low-code development should grow 23% this year.

As low-code/no-code – aka LCNC – has become so trendy, let me tell you about how it is actually the new chapter of a story that started half a century ago…

50 years ago: throwback to the early 70s, in Germany

Many of us were not even born in 1972 (including myself). On April 1st that year, and this was not an April fools gag, five former IBM employees – Dietmar Hopp, Hasso Plattner, Claus Wellenreuther, Klaus Tschira, and Hans-Werner Hector – started a company named System Analyse Programmentwicklung, which stands for System Analysis and Program Development. They simply figured out that businesses would be better run with the help of computers and software than with pen and paper, and their business idea was to create standard enterprise software that integrated all business processes and enabled data processing in real time.

SAP ?s founders worked closely with customers – often sitting side-by-side with their employees in customers’ offices to learn about business needs and processes. By 1975, they had built applications for financial accounting (RF), invoice verification, and inventory management (RM). That was the foundation of a new ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning – software category. In 1979, the company started developing R/2, the second generation of its software. In 1980, SAP ?s roughly 80 employees moved into their first own office building in Walldorf, Germany.

Worldwide expansion and move to the cloud

While R/2 was a huge success and the company was preparing their IPO in 1988, the five founders were looking ahead to the third generation of ERP software. The SAP R/3 success story began in 1992, with the client-server software smoothing the path to a globalized economy, turning SAP into a global player with subsidiaries and development centers all across the world.

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the company branched out into three markets of the future: mobile technology, database technology, and cloud. In 2015, SAP launched SAP S/4HANA, its latest generation of business software, running entirely on its SAP HANA database.

Beyond the ERP

For sure, SAP S/4HANA can handle enterprise business processes, but as any standard software only up to a certain point. Today’s IT landscapes are often fragmented, including software from different vendors many times purchased and used by business units and their end-users (meaning the sales teams, the finance analysts, the recruiters in HR, etc.), who look to solve their daily work tasks in the smartest way possible. Integrating these IT capabilities as seamlessly as possible to handle end-to-end business processes implies to develop many integrations and extensions, and until now they were coded exclusively by professional developers.

?Empowering the Citizen Developer, and making the Pro-Developer even better

Changing market dynamics force today’s organizations to evolve continuously, and while digital transformation was a line item on many business agendas long before COVID-19, the pandemic has shown very clearly how vulnerable companies really are. At the same time, resources are becoming scarcer. According to McKinsey, 87% of companies say they have skill gaps, or expect to within a few years. This can become a major handicap for their digitization. The need for developers is growing faster than they can be educated. These circumstances, paired with complex IT landscapes make it challenging for companies to be agile and innovative, and remain competitive.

To accelerate the pace of innovation while future-proofing their technology investment, companies see low-code/no-code – aka LCNC – and automation platforms as an immediate opportunity. This new generation of development tooling aims to democratize app development and automation. But, and it is very important, by providing a properly governed LCNC development platform to LoBs, our customers are able to gain efficiencies of scale with their tooling investment while protecting against security breaches, compliance failures, waste of resources and many other problems associated with shadow IT. We are empowering business users and citizen developers to create and extend their enterprise solutions on their own with simple visual – often times drag-and drop – development tools, within the guardrails established by IT governance. This win-win for IT and LoBs is critical to the transformational goals of SAP customers.

I am convinced that LCNC isn’t just for citizen developers. Also professional developers working in our customers’ IT departments are turning to low-code tools to increase their productivity and create applications and automations faster, with better consistency and built-in security.

How our LCNC vision and key principles will benefit to our customers and partners

Our aim is to empower our customers to extend, automate and enhance their LoB applications easily.

To deliver on this vision we have defined key principles that will guide each step and area of our product development:

·????????Elevate the user experience for all developer personas along the continuum, from citizen to professional developer

·????????Unify platforms and services, and reducing complexity of tools

·????????Focus on tight integration with SAP products and differentiated features using SAP business domain expertise.

SAP Business Technology Platform is firmly established today in the Process Automation area, supporting citizen automation products such as SAP Workflow Management and SAP Intelligent RPA. At SAPPHIRE 2021, we announced significant Low-Code/No-Code enhancements for process automation capabilities, with general availability of prebuilt process content packages in SAP Workflow Management and universal recorder and document information extraction for SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation.

The recent acquisition of Signavio complements SAP’s own investments in deep process mining to significantly improve the discovery and continuous optimization of business processes with data-driven insights.

SAP of course has always had powerful tools and SDKs for professional developers. To address the needs of application developers, SAP has recently acquired AppGyver, which empowers virtually anybody to create powerful extensions without writing a single line of code. And we have already been partnering with Mendix to offer a low-code development platform, streamlining and simplifying development for professional developers. Theseis enhance the SAP Business Technology Platform with full flexibility and capabilities that allow business users to build web and mobile applications, from low–code to no–code. Additionally, the SAP Business Application Studio is also delivering new low-code capabilities targeting development productivity gain. Using its intuitive built-in visual editors for UI and data models, it’s easy to develop applications for both mobile and web with almost no additional coding.

Looking to the future, we are working hard to leverage these great assets in the most convenient way for our customers. Step by step, we are creating a unified, business-centric and open offering for the Intelligent Enterprise, that will allow our customers to

·????????Leverage more resources to build applications and automations

·????????Maximize speed and agility through accelerated delivery and reduce total cost of development.

·????????Bridge the gap through co-development between business and IT, and increase adoption

·????????Enhance ROI by leveraging existing investments through seamless SAP integrations

·????????Accelerate time to value by using best practices with pre-built content packages

My passion here is to deliver our customers and partners a comprehensive and cohesive suite of tools for creating extensions across the enterprise, across SAP and 3rd party applications, and across the full continuum of developer personas, from IT and lines of business.