This summer I am celebrating 20 years of technical SAP consultancy … time surely flies when one is having fun :-) The SAP adventure started way back for me in 1995 when I graduated from school and got a chance to start working as a consultant at Anderson Consulting (currently known as ‘Accenture’). I was introduced into the SAP R/3 3.0 eco system and its programming language ABAP/4. The start of an interesting technical journey which led through many changes and iterations of different technologies.
I always had an interest in ’the internet’ so it was only ’logical’ I ended up doing most of my work in those areas once SAP started integrating its systems via a range of products and technologies.
The SAP technical environment itself has seen some enormous changes over those years: the SAP basis system changed dramatically — from the standard SAP ABAP stack into the SAP Netweaver stack with full dual support of ABAP and JAVA, the extension of ABAP into ABAP OO, and now recently the introduction of the SAP HANA (XS) system. The diversity of front-end technologies within those 20 years has been astonishing: SAP GUI, SAP Internet Transaction Server (ITS), Business Server Pages (BSP), Java WebDynpro, ABAP WebDynpro and now lately SAPUI5 (JavaScript) & SAP Fiori. Also on the integration part technologies & products have been changing: SAP Business Connector (BC), SAP Exchange Infrastructure (XI), SAP Process Infrastructure (PI), SAP Process Orchestration (PO), SAP Gateway, etc.
Looking back I can say that the most important lesson I learned so far would be: “never stop learning, always stay open-minded and don’t fear the change.” And now again we are currently on the start of a new decade of SAP revolution with the introduction of SAP HANA (XS) as the in-memory database system and the new SAP S/4 HANA ERP system … I am looking forward on getting started in those as well.
— Steven De Saeger
