Codeless SAP Development?

Less code, more business expertise drives process innovation

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.

For as long as we can remember, IT industry pundits have predicted that code generation tools would replace the need for classic manual software development. And while it is still too early to declare this inevitable, SAP is taking another step toward making codeless business process development an eventual reality.

Announced earlier this month at SAPPHIRE, planned business process management (BPM) and business rules management capabilities will be available in the SOA-ready NetWeaver platform to ramp-up customers in Q3 2008 with general availability within the SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment enhancement package 1 expected in early 2009.

These BPM and business rules management capabilities align with SAP’s ongoing commitment to help customers quickly and cost efficiently create and refine business processes that enable them to be more responsive, innovative and competitive. Advanced business process modeling and management capabilities mesh tightly with SAP’s strategy for driving SOA adoption among its customers, a strategy whose successful execution relies heavily on SAP’s growing community of business process experts.

Currently topping 350,000 members, SAP’s Business Process Expert (BPX) community is a hotbed of business process innovation. It is a collaborative, education-rich environment where business process experts share industry best practices and hone global process design skills. To date, more than 1,000 enterprise services for the SAP Business Suite applications have been delivered through the Enterprise Services Workplace site on SAP Developer Network (SDN). Since introducing the xApp term in 2003, SAP has branded and brought to market more than 60 xApps – not including mobile business xApps, analytic xApps and several hundred smaller xApps embedded in other solutions.

Deep functional insight and rigorous process design training combine in the business process expert, who creatively bundles enterprise services into xApps that are snapped together to modify an existing or create a new business process. xApp license revenue neared $200 million in 2006, and SAP remains bullish on the future of xApps, predicting that in time xApp sales revenue likely will top revenue from ERP licenses. For now, the xApp’s greatest value is perhaps that it enables organizations to move toward SOA in an iterative, strategic manner at the business process level.

A model-based, best-practices approach to process design is vital for many reasons. Speed, agility and cost top the list. Because there is significantly less manual code development involved in business process modeling, adaptive or innovative business processes can be quickly modeled, tested and implemented. Less coding also makes it easier to identify and configure exceptions prior to rollout, further accelerating speed to value.

Lastly, because today’s modeling tools are not dependent on costly and cumbersome relational databases, innovative business models are now affordable and available to any organization with access to BPX talent. Having no relational database ties also frees business process experts to utilize the latest user-interface technologies and cost-cutting virtualization tools.

Business process models are indispensable precursors to introducing new or improved business processes, and SAP’s growing business process modeling, orchestration and composition capabilities are bringing the utopian vision of code-less development into view. Stay tuned for more on this important trend, as ultimately it will impact the industry in a dramatic fashion.