ABAP for HANA – Strategy and Roadmap

With the rise of key technology trends like Cloud, Mobile, and In-Memory you may start to wonder how these affect the good old ABAP Application Server (AS). A recently published document describes SAP’s vision, strategy, development, and commitment to enable ABAP for SAP HANA. It addresses the following questions:

  • What ABAP support do customers and partners get with regard to the technology trends?
  • How does the AS ABAP help to leverage the benefits of the technology trends?
  • What is the impact on customer-specific developments (existing ones, new ones)?

In essence, SAP has started improving the AS ABAP in a step-by-step approach:

  •  Step1 – “ABAP can access SAP HANA”: ABAP-based applications can use the SAP HANA database as secondary persistence (side-by-side scenarios)
  • Step 2 – “ABAP runs on SAP HANA”: ABAP-based applications can use the SAP HANA database as primary persistence (analytical use-cases)
  • Step 3 – “ABAP optimized for SAP HANA”: the optimization of ABAP-based applications for the SAP HANA database is actively facilitated by the AS ABAP (transactional/hybrid use cases)

The new enhancement package to optimize ABAP for SAP HANA is planned to be available to first customers and partners by the end of 2012. Standard availability is planned for 2013. SAP intends to invest in ABAP technology beyond 2013. This means that SAP plans to continuously update the AS ABAP which might involve the deprecation of some selected functions.

– Mendel