In late 2008, we started a major transformation of our SAP NetWeaver development approach, processes and organization: We made a bold move with my 2000 people organization spread out into development labs world-wide to adopt Lean and Agile Software development methodologies in a systematic and consistent manner. The transformation was a major change effort and I have blogged about it on our SAP Community Network before (see my blog posts Square One, Good Riddance and Different people). Looking at where we stand today as an organization, our ability to deliver customer value, to deliver reliably, to adapt in an agile manner, to interact with customers and to innovate our product portfolio in a high quality manner, I consider this multi-year transformation a big success!

With the move to systematic, standard Scrum methodology within the organization, cross-functional teams moved into the focus of our interest. "Cross-functional team" meaning people across the necessary disciplines working closely together as "one team", namely software developers, software architects, information developers, UX designers, Scrum Masters and Product Owners to name the usual suspects. The great thing about these "cross-functional" teams is the ability to optimize the interaction between everybody that you need at the table to get the product done: efficiently and effectively. The more closely we can get this team to cooperate and interact, the better. They will share a better understanding of the overall goal of what they are trying to achieve, communication paths have been shortened as much as possible, diverse skills will increase the ability of the team to develop better ideas and approaches to the problem at hand, delivering more customer-centric results. All of this is also supported by the principles behind the Design Thinking methodology. And last but not least, once being "standardized" on Scrum approach, you can start training and developing complete teams in certain further skills, e.g. agile test practices, increasing likelihood to establish new software engineering practices in a sustainable manner.

Well functioning teams are a huge asset! While we sometimes like to see software developers as creative artists that can barely be forced into any constraint -- at least that's the romantic point of view that I myself tended to fall into when I was still developing software myself --, a fact is that almost all bigger software development projects are not done by a single individual but quickly by a number of people that somehow need to collaborate to get something relevant done. So the infamous "lonely guy behind a door" is something one does not necessarily see as the ideal working setup if you want to keep your customers happy and your business secured. Well functioning Scrum teams with predictable and transparent progress on the tasks at hand can be a big relief here.

Most of the time where I have seen teams to be dysfunctional or failing, have less been a general issue with working in cross-functional (Scrum) teams but rather could be attributed to the following:

1. Bad cut: The team did not work on a common problem, but was just a collection of people working on unrelated individual topics; sometimes "cutting" teams in a different way made this issue disappear

2. Bad chemistry: There were individuals in the team that did just not buy into the team as such; sometimes just assembling teams a bit different made this issue disappear

Very often I have been hearing discussions about the question whether teams have to be co-located, i.e. all team members being in the same physical location, or could -- or even should -- rather be distributed, e.g. across different locations or timezones.

I think either position -- when taken rigorously -- is somewhat shortsighted. Here's why I think so:

We form cross-functional Scrum teams to make the group internal communication and interaction as efficient and "personal" as possible and get diverse skills to the table. Of course there are modern means of communication like phone, instant messaging/chat, Skype, telepresence etc. that have made the physical distance less of a problem. Still, if you imagine that a team sits in the same office physically and makes use of these communication means mentioned, you would ask yourself whether it wouldn't be more efficient to just ask the question across the table or listen in on some side-discussion going on spontaneously on the whiteboard behind at the wall? Would be strange, wouldn't it? So while it is not impossible to work together even when distributed, it is probably more efficient to be co-located. At least in most cases.

At the same time, there are good reasons to accept or even actively establish a "distributed" team: e.g. if your product manager needs to be local to your customers in a certain region or a certain market. Or if there is specific or outstanding talent that you did not find "locally" but had to look for abroad. And this was considered more valuable than the potential loss in optimal communication efficiency associated with it.

So I think the important thing here is: there may be very good and valid reasons to accept that a team is distributed, but those reasons should be well considered and consciously decided. Not arbitrary "accidents". And they must for good reason outweigh the benefits of co-location.

Rules should cover the common sense 80% case. Exceptions always apply.

Another recurring question I have been running into and have heard heated debate about is whether our cross-functional teams have to be "long-living" (sometimes "forever-living"), i.e. they don't change their setup and mix of people, or should rather be "living" in the sense of adapting them optimally to the changing tasks at hand. Do you bring teams to work or work to teams?

As I had written in my prior blog post before, a well-functioning team is a huge asset. So you don't kill productivity achieved in such a team light-heartedly by ripping the team apart every now and then for arbitrary reasons. Rebuilding a team and getting it back into a high level of productivity is time-consuming and hence expensive.

At the same time, sticking to an existing team setup just because it's a functioning team but seeing that the product priorities and goals have over time changed so much the current team setup is more of a misfit than a fit, doesn't look reasonable either.

So somehow one needs to find a healthy balance between long-living and living team setups. As always, before triggering any change, why not empower those impacted and potentially best knowing what to do ideally, i.e. the teams themselves, and let them work it out on their own? ;-)

I've written about it before, but in late 2008, we started a major transformation of our SAP NetWeaver development approach, processes and organization: We made a bold move with my world-wide distributed, 2000 people organization to adopt Lean and Agile Software development methodologies in a large-scale, systematic and consistent manner. The transformation was a major project and I have blogged about it on the SAP Community Network before (see my blog posts Square One, Good Riddance and Different people). The transformation was a major effort over several years and is still ongoing today -- Lean and Agile are a journey, a mindset, not a one time act of implementation. In the meantime, we have added additional methodologies, e.g. Design Thinking, into our set of tools and they actually fit very well with Lean and Agile. 

When we started the whole transformation, we often got critical remarks from people in our own organization who were concerned that Lean was a methodology originating in production environments -- Lean was invented by Toyota in the 1940s already -- and was not a fit for Software Development. That's when I started to think about how to convince people that Lean (and Agile) was more than something for the automotive industry. Even in retrospective and after having had hundreds of individual talks and discussions around Lean, I like my original storyline around Lean Software Development back then. And I thought it might be worth sharing... So here's my "dog and pony show" presentation why Lean is relevant for any larger Software Development organization:

Lean Production goes back to Toyota. Taiichi Ohno introduced it first in 1940. It was originally targeted at manufactoring. A lot of criticism we hear about Lean in Software Development seems to come from the wrong perception that we would believe we can apply this 1:1 to our business. But we know we are not building cars – luckily!

We are in Software Development which is non-deterministic by its nature. It’s much more like animation movie making or modern architecture – you need to get the craftsmanship right, but more important to success is the creative and innovative character of what you are doing. It is a creative process, it’s an information creation process, learning is part of the journey and hence change is inherent to Software development. So rather than ignoring change, one better sets himself up to cope with it right from the start.

Nevertheless, what is common between car manufacturers like Toyota and us in Software Development is the strong desire to sustainably and profitably stay in business. In essence, it means eliminating all the waste that keeps you from maximizing customer value.

Luckily, we can look outside and see that a lof of people and companies in the same business as we have thought about and made practical experience how Lean Software Development can work. Just to name some examples: IBM has e.g. transformed their DB2 business, Salesforce.com has changed an 500 employee organization to an “agile development model” in recent years as well… And Microsoft has radically changed their way of developing e.g. their OS platform and development tools following lean concepts and agile principles. Mary and Tom Poppendieck have condensed their findings into writing and the following slides will explain in a bit more detail what the 7 core principles of Lean Software Development are.

The first thing to keep in mind is the fact that “Lean” is not a one-time activity, some procedure to implement and then you are done. It is about mindset and about sometimes surprising or seemingly counterintuitive thinking. It is for sure about continuous reflection on how you are approaching things. The foundation of lean is about continuous improvement and respect for people.

Principle #1 is to eliminate waste – and without going into details, all Lean Production “waste types” translate naturally into software development process “waste types” as well…

The second core principle is about learning as much and as early as possible and about correcting what you are doing. Like training to ride a skateboard in a half- or full-pipe: repeat often, learn quickly, adapt in the next cycle. Obviously, this principle gets manifested in fixed takt cycles, shipping working software early and often, involving stakeholders and customers from the start in each takt evaluating and giving feedback about the software, doing Scrum reviews and retrospectives to thrive for perfection in execution, looking at software development from an end-to-end perspective, etc.

Fooling yourself to believe you can predict the future or making decision based on premature information at hand, can be very costly to revert if you have to change plans afterwards. So core principle #3 is about making decisions as late as possible – but not later! One example is to tackle problems with a set-based approach, trying out more than a single solution in parallel, only later deciding on the best option. Or doing early prototyping and first getting customer/stakeholder feedback…

Core Principle #4: Deliver as fast as possible – both internal and external. It’s the-fastest-to-market who wins, not the biggest! It helps to avoid “inventory” on the shelf, gives you feedback early and allows you to put the right things into the next (short) development cycle – maximizing customer value!

Most challenging is “think different” probably for management – which is why we need “lean freaks” in management. It is about the insight that you get the best results, if you empower the teams, the colleagues who know best how to get things done, how to approach a certain goal. It is about respect for people. It is about getting rid of “process police”: you manage things, and you release people.

If you want to deliver fast and are dependent on fast feedback, if you want to maximize customer value, then quality cannot be an afterthought. You have to build quality into the product and the process simultaneously. And quality is more than defect-free software! It is about change-friendly code and architecture, about usability, about flexibility – it is about the integrity of the whole product.

Finally, think from a customer perspective – think from the delivery side. Don’t just optimize one area, but strive for making the whole a success.

To become “lean”, all of the 7 core principles have to be considered jointly, not “pick some, ignore the others”…

Inspired by a comment to one of my prior posts (You know that story of the Russian cosmonaut?), a comment about noise and getting into love with it, I thought it may be worth sharing some of our experience with building (office) space for building teams.

When we moved large-scale into Lean and Agile Software Development methodologies five years ago, the role and work of "the [cross-functional Scrum] team" got more and more important and we started to consider office space concepts that would better fit the new working model than our traditional 3-4 people offices that we had in some of our development locations (e.g. in the headquarter offices).

Colleagues were in search for collaboration space, needed spots for daily Scrum stand-up meetings and their Scrum boards, needed meetings rooms for the takt-start planning and takt-end review and retrospective meetings (all at the same time, of course). Also, we wanted to be able to move individuals easily and quickly around, if e.g. teams were changed or a UX designer was supposed to join a team, and we didn't want to always wait for weeks to get an official move approved and implemented by facilities or contractors... "Grab your laptop and make yourself comfortable at your new spot" was the goal...

As a first try, we had experimented with 3 "team rooms" which had been set up by tearing 2 walls down and making 3 normal offices into a bigger team room. While the pilot teams that moved in liked the space after some adjustments for their team related work, it quickly became clear that a) they had only accepted the room because each one of them still had their original desk in their prior office room and b) the team room was "an island" that was missing support infrastructure around: ad-hoc meeting rooms the team could retreat into to not disturb the others, "phone cells" for phone conversations that were disturbing the others or private in nature. So we figured out that we need more than "team room" islands in the classical office environment, but a space for teams that has been designed for that purpose from the ground up.

That's how we started the initiative called "Office Space for Teams" (OS4T), a collaboration of Facility Management, our central Lean unit and "the business", i.e. parts of my R&D unit. The goal was to pilot concepts for office space particularly tailored at teams and their need for communication and collaboration, supporting innovation and creativity.

There's meanwhile a short video about it on YouTube that you might want to check out (3 minutes) to get an impression yourself:

We quickly figured out that in a "Lean" environment, it would be stupid to not involve the main stakeholder into the whole design exercise: the Scrum teams themselves. So we ended with having a joint team from the three units above, plus external architects, plus representatives from the development teams themselves that gave input and guidance to the actual design the architects and interior designers came up with.

The declared goal was to emphasize "networking over nesting", i.e. priority 1 was to provide teams with an environment that would foster communication and collaboration supporting innovation and and that would not make the individual's wish for "nesting" the main goal. "Nesting" meaning: "let me alone, I want my private spot where noone disturbs me and I can 'nest' in".

The area affected was two "H"-shaped wings of our building, seating around 280 colleagues before the remodeling. The restructuring of the old smaller office rooms, meetings rooms, coffee corner into a coherent overall concept, resulted in more than 30% additional workspaces, places where people could sit and work, simply due to the fact that a lot of space was "wasted" in the past with pathways to connect the offices. So the new design made better use of otherwise "dead" space.

I don't want to bore you with the full story and all the nitty-gitty details -- this goes beyond a blog post I fear and the video above may already give you a good sense of what Office Space for Teams is about -- but share a few of the insights and learnings that we have made over the past months while "living" in the new space (I myself as well):

1. Open space for helping opening minds
If you want to foster creativity and innovation -- and software development is a highly creative undertaking -- provide the team with light, color, diversified and a haptic rich environment.
It helps getting into a creative and open state of mind. Sitting alone in a closed room, grey walls around you, a neon light buzzing at the ceiling and a steel door keeping everyone else out, is for sure not going to help make yourself more creative. Just to paint some extremes...

2. Flexibility is key
One of our goals was to make changing teams and "who sits where" easily changeable. One can think about moving tables -- even though one has to acknowledge that there are health and safety regulations in place that forbid to place tables or workstations anywhere, have power lines crawling all over the floor etc.. But one can standardize on the workplace equipment, e.g. provide everyone with a (powerful) laptop and mobile rather than a workstation and a landline phone, have people use containers with rolls rather than fixed cupboards etc.. So that in practice they can move their own stuff within 5 minutes rather than waiting for 4 weeks for a contract mover to carry their boxes and IT to re-wire their workstation... So far, from what we've seen, things are flexible enough in our new office space and there wasn't a strong demand to completely rearrange everything from ground up. We have changed team mixes a few times and people have been moving around quickly and easily. So it seems that one worked out.

3. Not all teams like such a collaboration environment
It seems that in particular teams, that rather are groups of people that work more or less independent from each other, consider a less "collaborative" environment more preferable as it is less distracting for them. If you're in a team that is heavily interacting, e.g. because you are working in exploratory mode on a brand-new product idea, then the situation is very different. Feedback from such teams has been very positive. Which leads to the next finding:

4. Believe it or not, but people are different
No matter how well you design the workspace, people -- and teams -- are different. What works well for one, can be a pain in the neck for the other. So it seems advisable to provide people with enough "variation" of workplaces, some Design Thinking rooms for whole teams when in creative mode, some more separated spots where individuals can work if they need concentration and don't want to be disturbed, one developer wants to work rather isolated for a while, while others prefer to be more part of the group etc.. The only thing limiting what one could provide is normally space constraints, the fact that you won't accomodate everyone's perfect preference and still keep a team together locally somehow and finally the nasty constraint called "budget" -- you cannot foresee everything and planning for the extreme case means usually "over-provisioning" which isn't an option in most cases. So there's always certain trade-offs to accept. And some learnings to be made.

5. People will need time to "settle down" in the new space
Whether you come from a completely open "cubicle space" environment or from a classical "two or three people in a room" one, you will need time to adjust yourself to the new setting. Also, people need to figure out how to use the space in the best way. We have one meeting room with bean-bag like seating, no table, just a projector at the ceiling and some whiteboard wall. Originally, the feedback from the team was: we can't use that room. Later, when we wanted to actually change the room into a Design Thinking room, the same team came back and objected and wanted to keep the room as it was: because they had figured out what meetings were best done in that kind of setting (and liked it that way) and for other purposes simply chose a different room.

6. Beware of the "library effect"
Being part of conversations is great, but only if it concerns your work. So while teams like the fact that you are easily informed about what's going on in your team by "listening" in or being able to easily contribute, if the communication "flows over" from some neighboring team that is unrelated then it's considered "noise". So better make sure that teams are acoustically separated from each other. Otherwise you will quickly end up in what we call the "library atmosphere": everybody is so concerned about disturbing someone else with their talk that no one dares to make any noise at all any more. The result is an artificially silent space where now no one wants to speak because you feel everybody else in the room can understand every single word.
So the more open a space is, the better your sound design needs to be. Concrete floors and bare ceilings, as stylish this may be as an "industrial look", are probably not a good idea while carpets, sound absorbing ceilings and "sound breakers" in the room can make a big difference. Some glass walls (or real walls) and sound-proof doors are a great idea as well from time to time. Not everything has to be completely "open".
As a result, we have put glass walls around the "team living rooms" that were originally openly placed within the teams regular workplaces with the effect that these spaces now get used for various purposes by the team -- informal meetings, face-to-face discussion, reading, relaxing with a coffee after lunch... The glass walls shield sounds, but keep the open and light atmosphere overall.

7. Fun is a serious thing in Germany
So you have to plan for those things very thoroughly as well ;-) We turned some former server rooms into a pool billiard and a kicker room. Who works seriously needs to have some serious fun from time to time...

We have made several surveys with people after we moved in and if asked whether they want to rather stay in the new office space or move back into the old office layout, roughly 2/3 prefer the new one over the old one. This is after 1 1/2 years roughly of "living" in there. And this results was showing after we had done an intense "care-taking" phase immediately after moving in, collected feedback from the teams and adjusted dozens of specific details here and there based on input we had received. We now consider the concept a success overall, with admittedly the potential for further improvements as mentioned above. There's always things to improve...

So that's my personal key experiences out of our Office Space for Teams project, without the claim of completeness or final truth. I love to work in the new office space. But that, of course, is personal taste.

P.S.: Uh, I forgot, we heard some concerns about "private space" in an open office environment. Developers (sometimes even managers) are a creative species. Nature always finds it's way... ;-)

Let's get terminology out of our way first - I'm talking about the stuff you use to build apps the way SAP builds them, then integrate them, present them well and secure them tightly. Most of this is called "middleware" by the market, and who can be against the market. In the old days this was easy to translate into SAP offerings - it was all SAP NetWeaver. Now with the cloud, mobile and new data architectures being everywhere it's a bit more differentiated, so you'll see me mentioning the SAP HANA Cloud Platform as well as the SAP Mobile Platform at times.

What can you expect middleware-wise at SAPPHIRE NOW next week? No major announcements, but steady progress in all relevant areas. We're expecting SAP NetWeaver 7.4 to be generally available by then, the best development platform for large-scale SAP HANA applications, including a refresh of all your favorite SAP NetWeaver hubs. We're expecting this to be picked up as quickly as 7.31 last year, with more than 3,600 customers live today.

To make things easier to navigate I'm breaking SAPPHIRE NOW down into four areas for you:

1. Develop applications - application servers, development tools, frameworks
2. Orchestrate processes - integration, process management and monitoring, rules management
3. Connect people - portals, UI frameworks, UI connectivity
4. Secure access - identity and access management

We weren't able to put these on the showfloor signs (unfortunately), so I'll summarize the most important sessions and stations you should visit for each of these areas. If not noted otherwise, all of these will be located in the "Database and Technology Campus". Links to the agenda builder are provided to help you add sessions to your personalized agenda. If you need to get a quick overview on site make sure visiting Eduardo Chiocconi and Helmut Grimm at discussion table DT624,

Additionally I'd like to highlight a rather innovative application of our platform technology, the SAP Financial Services Network. Built on the SAP HANA Cloud platform, using its network foundation and integration services, it provides a true business network connecting corporate finance organizations with their banks. It is shown in the Business Network Campus, make sure visiting expert table BN210 there.

Develop Applications

Highlights for application developers include the SAP HANA Cloud Platform as well as the latest SAP NetWeaver 7.4 enhancements for developers of applications with deep SAP HANA integration.

For more information on application development at SAPPHIRE NOW check out Gert Schroeter's blog post.

Orchestrate Processes

Witness the latest version of SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, as well as the new process monitoring and analysis capabilities with SAP Operational Process Intelligence.

For more information on process orchestration at SAPPHIRE NOW check out Mariana Mihaylova's blog post.

Connect People

Besides updates to on-premise SAP NetWeaver Portal, Duet Enterprise and SAP NetWeaver Gateway you can see the evolution of portal technology into mobile use cases and the cloud.

Secure Access

Centralized identity and access management has become mandatory for organizations.

For more information on access security at SAPPHIRE NOW check out Gert Schroeter's blog post.

SAP Financial Services Network

The world's first online business network directly connecting banks and other financial institutions with their corporate clients is now open for business. See it in action at the Business Network Campus.

For more information on the SAP Financial Services Network at SAPPHIRE NOW check out Uwe Erdtmann's blog post.

In addition to all of the above you can find a slew of in-depth presentations from customers, partners and SAP managers in the ASUG educational program, too many to list here. All that remains for me to say is safe travels and enjoy SAPPHIRE NOW, Orlando!

Best regards,

Harald Nehring

VP Technology Marketing

As explained in Bjoern Goerke's blog, SAP NetWeaver is our core technology platform, and as such, it will have a sound representation at our biggest customer conference SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, next week. We plan to release SAP NetWeaver 7.4, soon, including a fresh update of all favorite SAP NetWeaver hubs. At SAPPHIRENOW, and with mega trends of cloud, mobile and big data integration architectures we will paint SAP NetWeaver in a bigger, integrated platform picture toghether with our cloud and mobile infrastructure technology offerings (pls see more information on our activities in the Middleware Guide to SAPPHIRE NOW 2013!).

It is very important for SAP to demonstrate that customers can rely on an integrated and consistent technology platform to securely manage and extend business solutions, regardless of the consumption or deployment model.

Using the same platform tools allow partners and customers to build and run their own real-time applications, guaranteeing low TCO (same operations and expert know-how), as well as the proven reliability fro 70,000+ live installations. Key capabilities include people, process and information integration, together with consistent lifecycle management, security and application development capabilities (including the new ABAP for SAP HANA development!).

Our key technology platform messages at SAPPHIRENOW this year are:

• Rapidly adopt new technologies and applications by using a flexible platform, designed for change
• Boost business and IT efficiency with integrated on-premise and cloud-based technology infrastructures
• Simplify your IT and lower operating costs by removing layers and running enterprise and consumer applications in the cloud.
• Open and secure platform for building & supporting next-generation of applications from customers, ISVs and startups.

Featuring our key products in the "Application Development and Integration" area

• Connect People: SAP NetWeaver Portal, SAP HANA Cloud Portal, Duet Enterprise, SAP NetWeaver Gateway
• Orchestrate Processes: SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration (integration, process management, rules management)
• Secure Access: SAP NetWeaver Single-Sign-On, SAP NetWeaver Identity Management
• Develop Applications: SAP NetWeaver Application Server
• Cloud: SAP HANA Cloud Platform

Customers, sharing their story are the best proof of concept. This year, we are proud to have speakers from Bank of America, Accenture, AmerisourceBergen, Dr Pepper, Pepsico, Danone, ConAgra Foods, Siemens and National Football League!

A bolt summary of how our Database and Technology story at Sapphirenow is told: 38 customer stories, 22 theater presentations, 5 panels, 4 show floor studio interviews, press & analysts engagements, over 123 “Meet the Experts” sessions, 17 demo pods/discussion tables, 64 demo theater sessions, 32 microforums plus SAP HANA specials (find info on our complete D&T activities in this blog)

I look forward to seeing you in Orlando!

Today, SAP NetWeaver 7.4 was released to SAP customers for general availability.

Here is the list of the most important facts you should be aware of:

• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 is the compatible follow-up release to previous SAP NetWeaver versions.
• Previous code for the NetWeaver platform written in ABAP or Java runs without change.
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 is deployed on premise
• SAP UI5 and Gateway capabilities have been integrated into SAP NetWeaver 7.4
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 AS ABAP provides optimized access to SAP HANA and serves as a foundation to SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA.
• ABAP development and SAP HANA modeling and content development tools can be used based on Eclipse tooling platform
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 AS Java is functionally equivalent to SAP NetWeaver 7.31 AS Java (Java codebases are identical)
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 supports advanced Business Continuity scenarios
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 offers new opportunities for customers and partners to build own new solutions or optimize existing ones in ABAP for SAP HANA.
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 offers guidelines, best practices and integration scenarios which have been developed in customer engagement initiatives.

There is a lot more to know for you about SAP NetWeaver 7.4

Therefore we published a SAP NetWeaver landing page which provides a detailed overview and positioning,

points to all relevant spaces and resources on SCN, and gives you an introduction to cross scenarios that bridge between

important technologies such as SAP NetWeaver, SAP HANA and SAP HANA Cloud.

Please chech out the landing page that ties it all together: SAP NetWeaver 7.4 - Optimized for SAP HANA, Cloud and Mobile - Available now!

We look forward to your feedback and are happy to answer your upcoming questions.

Best regards,

Monika Kaiser and Karl Kessler

Today is a big day for us! We have made the next release of SAP NetWeavergenerally available (GA) to the public: SAP NetWeaver 7.4!

I have outlined the direction of our activities around our technology platform which is productively used in more than 70.000 system deployments world-wide in one of my previous blog posts. SAP NetWeaver 7.4 is now the next step of this roadmap delivered to our partner and customer ecosystem.

SAP NetWeaver 7.4, now being the new NetWeaver go-to-release for all existing NetWeaver customers, comprises new versions of the application hubs like SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, SAP NetWeaver Portal, SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration and SAP NetWeaver Gateway, the Application Servers ABAP and Java, as well as Lifecycle Management, SAP NetWeaver Identity Management and Single Sign-On as well as new UI capabilities and services, in particular "SAPUI5".

SAP NetWeaver 7.4 is a "non-disruptive evolution" that extends the "classical" NetWeaver into the "dimensions" of HANA, Cloud and Mobile. It continues to support all databases but is now optimized to optimally support SAP HANA. With ABAP 7.4 optimized for SAP HANA it is the foundation for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA and SAP Business Information Warehouse powered by SAP HANA. With this it plays also an important role in our new SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offering. In addition, also the SAP NetWeaver Java-based Hub solutions will run on SAP HANA.

During the development phase we put a strong focus on a number of specific cross scenarios that substantially improve the development experience, lower the total cost of development and operations and best support hybrid on-premise/Cloud scenarios.

The most important SAP NetWeaver 7.4 cross scenarios include:

• Seamless end-to-end development experience across components based on the Eclipse Development Environment including running sample scenarios provided for trial access in the Cloud, complemented by documentation, tutorials and working code.
• Easy deployment to Virtual Private Clouds like Amazon Web Services or (soon) HANA Enterprise Cloud with the SAP Cloud Appliance Library
• Further improved support of Business Continuity to minimize the business downtime in customer landscapes
• Optimal support for hybrid application scenarios (On-premise/Cloud) with SAP HANA Cloud Integration as already used by SuccessFactors to integrate with SAP Business Suite
• Easy creation of Mobile applications with SAP HANA Cloud using SAPUI5, SAP NetWeaver Gateway and SAP HANA Cloud Gateway and SAP Mobile Platform Cloud Edition
• One Identity and Access Management with NetWeaver Identity Managament and Single-Sign On, spanning federation of user data from on-premise to cloud and allowing seamless Single Sign-On capabilities

You might want to check out the new SAP NetWeaver 7.4 "landing page" on the SAP Community Network to get in-depth details about what's new and exciting in SAP NetWeaver 7.4.

That much for today...

With the recent announcement of the SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud, a number of questions have been circulating about how this offering relates to SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Platform, “NEO” etc.. Confused? So let me try to put things straight, it’s actually pretty simple:

What is SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?

The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offering is a comprehensive cloud infrastructure combined with managed services to allow customers to run their SAP HANA applications, including SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA, in a managed virtual private cloud environment. We prefer to refer to this as an Enterprise Cloud.

What is the SAP HANA Cloud Platform?

It is (and remains to be) SAP’s only public Developer Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS) offering that allows SAP partners, SAP customers and SAP development itself to build, deploy and operate applications in an open and standards-based Cloud environment. Building these applications is made easy by our offering of a number of shared application services and in particular the power of SAP HANA in a service-based manner. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform is hence tailored towards the huge SAP developer community: It provides both Java and Java VM-based language environments like Java itself, (j)Ruby, Scala, Python, Clojure or Groovy as well as HANA native development capabilities like e.g. SQLScript or River Definition Language.

SAP operates this infrastructure, partners and customers can focus on their applications without having to worry about the operations of the underlying technology stack.

While in general allowing to build a wide variety of application types on top, the platform is particularly optimized for two major use cases:

1. Serving as an open extension platform for
   • SAP Business Suite solutions running on-premise in a customer landscape,
   • SuccessFactors solutions running in the Cloud as a Software-As-A-Service offering and of course, since the recent announcement,
   • SAP Business Suite solutions powered by HANA running in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
2. Building completely new, powerful and high-performance applications on SAP HANA

Examples are “edge” applications extending core functionality in the SuccessFactors Employee Central offering, or extending the reach of classical SAP Business Suite applications like Human Capital Management (HCM) employee self-services with a consumer-grade user experience via mobile devices using HTML5 (e.g. via SAP UI5) or native mobile device experiences.

SAP NetWeaver Cloud Platform is the retired name for a subset of HANA Cloud Platform, which has meanwhile smoothly evolved into something even bigger. It provides the SAP HANA Cloud Platform with its core operations framework, the core services like Identity Management, Single Sign On, Cloud/On-Premise Connectivity, Persistency, Metering and Monitoring, integration into the SAP Store for subscription and billing purposes, etc..

“NEO” has been the SAP internal project name for SAP NetWeaver Cloud platform before it was originally released last year and — as such nicknames tend to do — has been more sticky with people than the marketing department has been hoping for

How do HANA Enterprise Cloud and HANA Cloud Platform fit together?

As outlined above, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is focusing on providing SAP solutions powered by HANA as managed services in an enterprise-grade, virtual private cloud environment. SAP HANA Cloud Platform can be used to extend these solutions via our public cloud Platform-As-A-Service offering, as one can already do with SAP solutions “classically” operated on-premise or SuccessFactors solutions offered in a cloud environment itself.

Both SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud Platform are running collocated in the same certified SAP Data Center sites and hence allow to be efficiently combined and put to action for dedicated scenarios. In a way, SAP HANA Cloud Platform is available with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, or it is contained in it, but somehow these statements appear to be a bit academic to me. What is really important is that these two offerings fit and work together: One does not replace the other, but each of them solves a specific problem of our customer and partner ecosystem. They compliment each other: All capabilities offered by SAP HANA Cloud Platform can be put to work with solutions provided by SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.

Hope that helps to clarify a bit.

I find this to be very handy when we have a situation where we require troubleshooting in terms of performance as you can see exactly what was running when, how much memory/cpu utilization etc.

To start the collection run transaction /n/SDF/MON or go to SA38 and execute job /SDF/MON.

Click on SCHEDULE NEW MONITORING

Fill in the desired parameters like the duration of the analysis and the interval for the snapshot and execute

Once this is done go back to /SDF/MON and click on EXECUTE

Double click on the line to access the MONITORING DATA page.

On this page you can double click on the DIA/CPU/FREE MEM etc. to get and overview of what was running on the system at that exact time.

Hope this is helpful

Any feedback would be appreciated

Best Regards

Marius

One of the most important SAP NetWeaver 7.4 cross scenarios mentioned by Björn Görke in his SAP NetWeaver 7.4 GA announcement blog is the easy deployment of SAP on Premise solutions into public clouds like Amazon Web Services with SAP Cloud Appliance Library, so here I’d like to summarize where we are with the Cloud Appliance offering and how this relates to SAP NetWeaver 7.4 as well as the trial versions for SAP NetWeaver 7.4 hubs.

The overall idea of SAP Cloud Appliance Library (CAL) is to offer ready to use SAP on Premise software solutions in a simple way. The CAL automated software provisioning
reduces setup time to half an hour without any requirements for separate investments in hardware.

Using CAL as a new shipment channel, SAP customers can now deploy pre-configured SAP solutions directly into their public cloud account. CAL contains an ever-growing number of pre-configured SAP solutions like ERP for Financials, SAP CRM,  SAP SCM and SAP HANA … – which are all available in the SAP Store. At present these offerings are available for demo and evaluation purposes, saving time for setting up and initially configuring the solutions you need. The article in SAPinfo SAP Cloud Appliance Library answers questions you might have around CAL regarding target audience, components involved, costs etc.

Since CAL is merely a new shipment channel the licensing conditions for SAP solutions remain unchanged –

“bring-your-own-license” for the software product you want to consume via SAP Cloud Appliance Library. Overall, CAL aims not only to offer existing products, but also new products which have just been released for on premise delivery – e.g. trial versions of NetWeaver 7.4 hubs.

There are two kinds of trial versions currently available with CAL: 

1) Trials for CAL solution itself -- go to the CAL trial offering here:

• A limited 7 day offering requiring only  an SCN user - no account at a cloud provider, no SAP license at all!
• A 30 day offering giving you more time for evaluation of the full blown functionality of Cloud Appliance Library. In order to subscribe for
  it, you need an S-User or SCN User, a valid SAP ERP license and a cloud provider account.

2) Trials for new SAP product versions: Trial versions of the major SAP NetWeaver 7.40 hubs will be available as

pre-configured appliances – starting with SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP 7.4 on HANA in June and soon to be followed by SAP NetWeaver Business Process Management  and SAP NetWeaver Portal.

These developer trials come with a trial license valid for 90 days and the appliances can be found in the store as well as being linked from the respective SCN pages.

Links to key information:

• SAP Cloud Appliance Libraryin SAP.info
• SAP Cloud Appliance Library on SAP.com - includes product video and link to
  offering in SAP store (browse for Cloud Solutions and SAP Cloud Appliance
  Library).
• SCN homepage for SAP Cloud Appliance Library - including
  more information on free CAL trials.

*For Redefining Middleware As You Know It*

The SAP Technology forum turned into a huge success and is heading on world tour for 3^rd year in a row.

Join us at the SAP Middleware Technology Forum in Palo Alto, California, on June 20^th 2013 to learn how to capitalize on the mobile, cloud, and Big Data opportunities in front of you and seamlessly integrate your infrastructure.

The headline this year is Redefining Middleware As You Know It, and we invite you to meet SAP experts in person and connect with peers on user experience, real time, big data, process, cloud and more.

Participate in the expert sessions and panel discussions to explore questions like:

• Is it really possible to transform your approach to data, process, user experience, and change management without business disruption?
• How to protect existing investments and establish a road map for the future with middleware solutions from SAP that accelerate your business into real time?
• How seamless middleware for the real-time enterprise works?

You will choose from three tracks – application development and integration, information management, and IT management– and explore the latest innovations that will help you:

• Process Orchestration with SAP and Beyond - unify all your data, process, and users in one radically simplified middleware platform
• Deliver accurate information to any application or user, anywhere – in the cloud, on premise, or to a mobile device
• Analyze any volume or type of data - internal or external, operational or transactional, and structured or unstructured with SAP Operational Process Intelligence, when Big Data and Processes Need to Work Together
• Manage change within your lifecycle, improve testing, and reduce deployment risks
• Get deeper insights with near-zero business process response time, for decisive action in the moment
• Advanced IT Management for SAP HANA and Mobility
• Revitalize your current applications and unleash the potential of new ones with beautiful user experiences
• Reduce TCO while protecting existing software investments and accelerating development

View full agenda for all  tracks > and Register today >

Join us on June 20, 2013, to discover how to fast-forward business insight and prepare to redefine the way you think about data.

Time:

9:00 am – 4:30 pm

Location:

SAP America, Inc. – Palo Alto
3410 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304

Register today!

We look forward to see you there!

heloo every body..

i have no user id and password for log in to sap log on pad..

please any body can solve my this problem? how to make new log in id  for sap...

please answer me on my e.mail i.d ... shoaib_gloomy@yahoo.com

Hello SAP experts,

I want to describe a phenomen which can occur in newer Support Packages (with the new standard job SAP_BTC_TABLE_CONSISTENCY_CHECK or the SM65 check) and also how to use the new standard jobs and SM65.

New Standard Jobs

There are two new standard jobs (note 1440439 - New Standard Jobs (2)):

    1. Job name: SAP_ADS_SPOOL_CONSISTENCY_CHECK

              Report: RSPO1042

              Description: Delete "orphaned" ADS spool files

              Note: 1493058

    2. Job name: SAP_BTC_TABLE_CONSISTENCY_CHECK

              Report: RSBTCCNS

              Description: Check batch table consistency

              Note: 1549293 Other terms

Implemented with the following SPs:

SAPKB70029

SAPKB70113

SAPKB70213

SAPKB71016

SAPKB71111

SAPKB73009

SAPKB73107

SAPKB74001

So all of you who have implemented ERP EhP6 SP07 for SEPA are concerned! (SAPKB73107)

To activate the new jobs go to SM36, click on standard jobs (SHIFT+F4) and click on default scheduling (please delete unnecessary Jobs like SAP_COLLECTOR_FOR_NONE_R3_STAT in a ABAP only system) or schedule it with your third party job tool (like Control-M, UC4 etc.).

If you have scheduled the standard jobs, which you definitively should (notes 1411877 and 16083 to avoid growth of you basis tables), you will have the table consistency check and automatically fix for the batch tables.

You can see the output in the SM37 job log or in SM21 system log (produced with SM65 other messages look exactly):

SM65

At first implement note 1549293 (SM65: Consistency check improvements), because during normal operation time it locks the TBTCO completely which effects the whole jobs in your system!!!

Start TA SM65, Goto Additional test and select like in this picture and execute:

If you have every day such error messages, you have to change the scheduled time for the standard jobs

Because these can occur every time when the 2 jobs SAP_REORG_JOBS and SAP_BTC_TABLE_CONSISTENCY_CHECK run at the same time! Please run first SAP_REORG_JOBS and then the other one.

If you still have such messages after you scheduled the reorg jobs:

Inconsistency detected in tables TBTCO and TBTCP

Inconsistency detected in tables TBT*

Please follow the instructions below:

- check note 924198 if table TBTCCNTXT is affected

- implement note 1381629 and run report ZDELBADCONTEXT to check and then fix the inconsistencies

SM65 is also a good tool for checking the server after an upgrade/migration like TA SICK. I think this transaction is not so widespread, but pretty cool to get an overview.

I hope I could something new about the BTC tables and the standard jobs.

Cheers out!

Jens

The SAP Technology forum sapforum turned into a huge success and is on its world tour for 3^rd year in a row.

Join us in Birmingham on July 3 & 4 to experience the future of business with SAP!

If you’re responsible for bringing the real-time enterprise to life, this year’s SAP Forum UK & Ireland is a must. Join us at the ICC Birmingham and meet SAP experts in person for a privileged insight into SAP’s latest analytics, mobile, social, cloud, process, big data and in-memory technologies.

The first day, 3rd July, is aimed at business leaders, who will see what the future of business looks like. The second day, 4th July, is designed for IT professionals like you, whose job it is to make the vision a reality.

The day’s programme is completely free and offers a comprehensive range of sessions to choose from: industry microforums, breakthrough sessions, experience zones. Places are limited so please register today.

Forum tracks include:

• Connecting People– Your employees, suppliers and partners increasingly expect IT to “just work” delivering a seamless experience across devices. We show SAP’s innovations in User Experience.
• Building Applications– SAP is embracing open standards in our Cloud Platform as a Service, integrating seamlessly with your on-premise SAP estate. See the future of SAP application architecture.
• Managing Applications– Automation, virtualisation and Cloud have the promise of increasing the agility and reducing TCO of the SAP and Enterprise Applications estate. We outline a vision for this.
• Governing Data– Data is the lifeblood of your organisation be it about your customers, supply chain, employees and operations – Learn how data governance has a material impact on your business.
• Orchestrating Processes– IT agility, increasing the pace of business innovation and having the insights to deliver business responses to rapidly changing market situations are covered in this track.
• Making the Enterprise Real Time– Your organisation is only as good as the data that runs it. Developing a platform to gather, organise and deliver data in real-time can transform your business.

Master our latest technology

As a SAP insider, you’ll hear our strategy for the year ahead, see demonstrations of working prototypes, and discover how to develop, implement, optimise and upgrade SAP systems. In particular, we will share the amazing capabilities of:

• SAP HANA and SAP HANA Cloud
• SAP ABAP development
• SAP Cloud Appliance Library
• SAP NetWeaver

Process Orchestration

Identity Management

Single Sign-On

Landscape Virtualization Management

Gateway

• SAP Operational Process Intelligence
• SAP Efficient Test Management
• SAP Landscape and Datacenter Innovation
• SAP Information Governance
• SAP Business Rules

Get your free mobile app

Register now for the SAP Forum and receive your free mobile event app to help you make the most of the event.

Places are limited so please view full agenda & all tracks> and Register today>

Where:

SAP FORUM 2013 sapforum

Date: 3rd - 4th July 2013
Venue: ICC, Birmingham
Cost: Free to IT professionals

Please note that this event is only open to existing and prospective SAP customers.

Who:

IT professionals, including:

• Database managers
• IT architects
• SAP architects
• IT managers
• Infrastructure managers

How:

Register today!

We look forward to meeting you there!

I’ve often wondered why I see so many SAP systems which don’t offer SSL connections for their client applications, be they traditional SAP GUI clients, browsers running BSP or Web Dynpro applications or the IE runtime embedded into Netweaver Business Client. To me this has always seemed strange because SAP applications contain a lot of information I thought companies would be interested in keeping safe and secure: customer data, accounting information, salary information, etc.

Every time I asked the question of a Basis consultant though, I received an answer along the lines of “SSL introduces too much overhead”, or it “slows things down”.

But hang on, it’s 2013! Google searches are now all done over HTTPS by default, for 38,000 search queries per second! So how hard can it be?

Let’s try to get a handle on this by looking at the impact of switching to SSL to both network performance and server-side CPU load. I’m not going to worry about client-side CPU impact, as there are many more clients than servers, and they’re all multi-core systems running idle most of the time anyhow :-).

To keep things simple, I will only look at HTTP rather than the DIAG protocol used by SAP GUI. HTTP - through Web Dynpro and NWBC - is the future anyhow ;-).

The vast majority of SAP’s products - from old R/3 systems to HANA - use the Internet Communication Manager as the bridge between incoming HTTP traffic and the applications. This is nice because the ICM is more powerful than usually appreciated, and findings here with one system are broadly applicable to many of SAP’s products.

Network Impact

Let’s first recall the OSI model to understand where SSL (really, TLS) sits relative to other networking protocols we need for our HTTP communication example:

Because there are turtles all the way down, I’ll only focus on the highlighted sections above. The other layers are interesting and very important to understand (mobile app connectivity, anyone?), but they’re not overly relevant right now.

So, let’s assume we have obtained an IP address (i.e. everything up to Layer 3 is done) and want to make a simple HTTPS GET request to an SAP system via SSL. Let’s also assume we are using HTTPS from the outset by specifying a URL starting with https://, rather than starting with HTTP and letting the server upgrade the protocol to HTTPS. I think that’s reasonable for the usual portal/NWBC-based interactions with SAP systems; I don’t think many users type WebDynpro URLs directly into their browser...

This scenario results in the following flow of messages:

Click the image above for a full-size version

Messages 1, 2 and 3 establish a TCP connection at Layer 4 in the OSI model. This is the typical three-way TCP handshake which establishes a reliable TCP session, and is required regardless of whether SSL is used to encrypt communications or not. In the OSI model, higher-level protocols such as HTTP or SSL build upon the foundations established by the lower layers.

The next 4 messages shown in orange are where the real work to set up an SSL session happens. This is where the client verifies the server’s identity, and both parties independently derive a shared session key used to encrypt subsequent communication. I will leave the details of this public/private-key cryptographic “magic” to the links at the end, but a few things are important here:

• There are “only” two round-trips across the network. This isn’t so terrible even across a WAN.
  • (to be precise, these are Layer 4 round-trips. If the server is using large 4096 or 8192 bit certificates, a long certificate chain, etc. then the network packets will be too big and cause the TCP congestion windows to overflow, resulting in further round-trips at Layer 3 in the stack)
• Asymmetric public/private-key encryption is used to establish this shared encryption key. Asymmetric encryption is relatively slow and CPU-intensive, so the handshake is expensive.
• Once the key is established, both parties will use fast and efficient symmetric encryption (e.g. 3DES, AES, RC4 or any other algorithm agreed upon during the handshake) to encrypt data. This is usually fast.

Finally the client can send its HTTP request message over the SSL session established earlier. The server will respond to the request across the same pipe, which is secure from eavesdropping by outsiders. Nice!

Server CPU Impact

You know, Moore’s Law is great. Every 18 months, computing capacity is expected to double.

But over the lifetime of an SAP system, it’s astonishing! Applied over 10 years, we would see computing power increase by a factor of 100! One of my current clients has been running SAP ERP since 1998, or for 15 years. That’s long enough to witness a factor 1000 improvement!!

Source: Twitter

So maybe the slow, asymmetric encryption used to derive session keys during an SSL handshake was an issue when many experienced Basis consultants set up their first systems. But today? Definitely not!

My 2008-era MacBook Pro can sign 2048bit RSA keys in 9.1 milliseconds, my 2012 MacBook Air takes 6.1 ms, and the Xeon-based systems we run various SAP apps on take 3.5 ms.

Once the SSL session is established, data travelling across it is encrypted using more efficient symmetric algorithms such as AES or RC4. Their throughput is even greater: 173 MB/s and 650 MB/s respectively on the same Xeon-based servers.

Based on these figures, the performance impact of moving to SSL should be between small and negligible. However it’s always a good idea to confirm theories by way of a test.

Let’s Test!

The exact setup is described below in a lot more detail, but here’s the short version:

• 50 parallel threads in soapUI sending GET requests to a resource in the ICM memory cache
• 200 requests per thread. No delay between requests.
• 500ms thread start-up delay (i.e. ramp-up takes 25s)
• Pre-emptive HTTP Basic authentication (i.e. credentials are sent as part of initial GET request rather than after receiving a 401 response from the server asking for authentication)

We will use three scenarios:

1. Plain-text HTTP. Enough said.
2. HTTPS, by changing the URL used in the test to https://
3. HTTPS as above but with the “Close Connection between requests” option selected, forcing a TCP connection and SSL handshake for every request. In the graphs, I’ve called this “SSL All-New”

Results

Client Impact

The main concern here is response time. If SSL under load takes a significantly long time, then this will translate into a poor experience for the user. SoapUI recorded the response times in milliseconds for each test scenario, and Excel created the following histogram:

Click the image above for a full-size version

Here the cost of SSL traffic does become visible. However the overhead is small for the ‘normal’ SSL scenario at less than 10ms - not noticeable to end users.

The ‘three peaks’ distribution of the “all-new” scenario does seem a little strange and could merit further investigation into profile and ICM parameters, or even repetition using a different client tool to eliminate issues on the soapUI side.

Slightly more concerning are the approx. 2% of requests which took longer than 200ms to complete in the “all-new” scenario. Most of these took over 1 second, which will definitely be noticeable to end users. If the “all-new” scenario of 75 SSL handshakes a second sounds like something your ICM server could experience, then further tests and tuning would definitely be a good idea. I can’t begin to speculate the cause of this phenomenon.

Server Impact

I used a simple ‘top’ command on the server to record the CPU usage of the icman process, which is what the ICM is called at the operating system level. Here are the results, smoothed using a 15 second moving average:

Click the image above for a full-size version

Although the ‘normal’ SSL scenario consumed around a third more CPU than the same test using plain-text HTTP, it still stayed below 5% of CPU usage on a single core. The ‘worst case’ test of establishing a new connection for every request consumed around 3 times more CPU than the plain-text base case. But even then, the 15-second moving average did not go above 10% of a single CPU core.

Basically, even at ~75 SSL handshakes per second, the impact on a multi-core system would be barely noticeable.

ICM Workload

Snapshots of the ICM workload taken during the test also back up this picture. Even in the “all-new” scenario, the number of ICM worker threads reached a peak of 64 - again nothing to worry about on a sandbox system with a maximum of 250!

Network Impact

Using SSL means encrypting packets between the client and the server. Intermediary proxy caches, WAN optimisers and other network infrastructure often deployed in global organisations to squeeze more out of their expensive WANs thus won’t be able to look into those packets and cache them for other users. So if you’re using SSL to encrypt icons, stylesheets, and other static, non-private resources, then there will be a performance cost as clients have to fetch them from the server every time. Depending on your topology, this may be expensive and sub-optimal. However I’m testing the SAP server-side impacts here, so I’m calling this out of scope.

Using SSL also means at least one additional round-trip to the server to perform the initial handshake. Being around ~2ms away from the server, this won’t really be noticeable. I’m guessing it also won’t be noticeable loading a Web Dynpro app with dozens of HTTP resources and hundreds of kilobytes of data. But it might make a difference to high-volume or low-latency API consumers (REST clients, anyone?), so it’s something to consider.

Test Setup

Server Setup - Code

On an SAP system, HTTP requests go through the ICM which acts as both a HTTP server and reverse proxy in front of the ABAP application server. The ICM also terminates SSL traffic, and this is where the pain of many SSL handshakes should be felt most acutely.

On the SAP server side, I am reusing a HTTP handler which I had previously written for another load testing exercise and which contains a very bad implementation of a Fibonacci sequence generator. It’s “very bad” on purpose in order to generate a lot of CPU load; if I knew what I was doing with ABAP, I probably could have written a terrible or even horrendous implementation.

The full code of the IF_HTTP_EXTENSION~HANDLE_REQUEST method is available here as a Gist. Suggestions towards an “improved” v2 are always welcome! ;-)

In order to separate the server load of processing HTTP and SSL traffic from the load caused by actually processing request messages and generating responses, we need to enable caching of responses in the ICM memory cache. This is in-memory computing without HANA and really a cool feature! Setting this will cause the ICM to serve responses very quickly and without going back to the ABAP system and consuming CPU cycles in the process.

ICM caching is easily enabled by adding the following line into the IF_HTTP_EXTENSION~HANDLE_REQUEST method of your HTTP handler: server->response->server_cache_expire_rel( expires_rel = '300').

Alternatively, it would also be possible to use some other resources which are currently cached by the ICM. The current contents of the ICM’s cache can be seen via transaction SMICM > Goto > HTTP Plug-In > Server Cache > Display. Usually it will contain image files or CSS style sheets belonging to the Web Dynpro or UI5 frameworks by default.

Server Setup - SSL

In order to test SSL performance, the SAP system needs to be given some SSL certificates via transaction STRUST and the ICM be configured with an SSL port and relevant config. If you want to test SSL with client authentication, then client certificates will also need to be issued, installed in the client’s certificate store, and their fingerprints mapped to an SAP user account using table USREXITD - all things which I won’t go into for fear of making this blog even longer...

Client Setup

There are a large variety of client tools which can generate HTTP traffic to load test a server. jMeter, cURL or Httperf would all do the job extremely well, but I’m using soapUI here mostly because it’ll be good enough for the job and it’s a tool I use quite a bit so there’s no learning curve.

SoapUI lets me create a test script which I can then execute using its built-in load testing functionality using multiple parallel threads. For this test, I’m aiming to measure the CPU utilisation of the SAP system’s ICM process under repeatable load: in this case, 50 parallel threads sending a new request as soon as a response to the previous request has been received.

I’ll use two scenarios here:

1. “Normal” SSL. Each thread makes 10 requests to the server before exiting. (soapUI will immediately restart it to continue the test). While the thread is running though, it will reuse the TCP connection with the server according to the server’s instructions in the keep-alive header. This means it also won’t drop the SSL session, and thus perform fewer ‘expensive’ SSL handshakes.
2. “All-new” SSL. The connection with the server is closed after each request, meaning a new SSL handshake needs to be performed for every request. This isn’t a realistic scenario as no well-behaved client such as web browsers would do this, but it helps in placing additional load on the SSL components on the server.

The soapUI project file is also on Github if you're interested in repeating the tests on your own system.

Further Reading

A whole raft of blogs and presentations have been very useful in devising these tests. If you're interested in SSL from a performance perspective, I would highly recommend the following as ideal primers to what quickly becomes a deep dive into the multiple layers of any IT stack:

http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/geekery/ssl-latency.html

http://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Sockets_Layer

Two months ago general availability of SAP NetWeaver 7.4 was announced.

Since then SAP NetWeaver 7.4 was downloaded more than 1000 times from SAP Service Marketplace!

Let us do a quick recap of the main capabilities of 7.4:

• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 responds to emerging market trends such as in memory, mobile and cloud.
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 optimizes access to SAP HANA.
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 offers new ways to bridge between on premise and on demand solutions running on SAP HANA Cloud.
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 paves the way for the development of mobile apps running on popular devices such as smart phones and tablets.
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 represents the foundation for SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 brings embedded NetWeaver Gateway and SAP UI5 capabilities.
• SAP NetWeaver 7.4 offers new opportunities for custom development projects in the context of SAP HANA
  featuring development tools, guidelines and best practices to get the most out of SAP HANA.

Now, you might argue "Great. I heard that before, but what happens to my NetWeaver hubs such as the NetWeaver Portal, Business Warehouse or NetWeaver Process Integration in my SAP landscape? Which deployment options are available for SAP NetWeaver 7.4? How about Business Suite content for the 7.4 hubs?" and much more.

Fortunately, SAP NetWeaver 7.4 SP3 was just released. Apart from the usual maintenance aspect of a support package upgrade paths from older NetWeaver releases to 7.4 are now available. In addition the first Java based NetWeaver hubs such as AS Java, Portal, BPM and ADS are enabled to run on SAP HANA. Content questions are important in this context for obvious reasons.

We pulled together all the various aspects when deploying SAP NetWeaver 7.4 in the following document (with notes):

SAP NetWeaver 7.4 Deployment Options

Hope this information provides you with orientation you need for a successful deployment of 7.4 and I am happy to answer your upcoming questions.

Best regards,

Karl

As consultants we have all experienced that dreaded moment when we realize that an issue needs to be resolved with the help of SAP. Most customers, and many consultants have a negative reaction to having to open a message with SAP because it is most often associated with inefficiency, intentional delays and standard SAP answers that don’t seem to help. However, that fear can be eliminated by learning the method to managing SAP messages as detailed below. I have seen too many customers who complain about a message not being resolved timely, but only to find that the messages themselves were ill-written and mal-prepared.

An incredibly important but totally under-emphasized skill for good SAP consultants is knowing how to work the SAP support system. The person managing a SAP message is vital to how fast the solution comes about, which can be very critical to the timeline of a project. And in order to be efficient in managing SAP messages, one needs to know the exact problem, how it is produced, as well as how it fits into the end to end solution.

For example, we had a problem with PI’s communication channel monitoring at a client. The monitoring dashboard displays nothing besides a warning message that says to check the trace for details. When looking at the trace, there are no errors or warnings related to the monitoring dashboard. This issue only happens sometimes, so it cannot be reproduced consistently. Just because someone knows PI and communication channels, it doesn't mean that he/she knows how the monitoring dashboard is managed, and how to check what sort of actions would trigger the warning. This is exactly why the person opening a SAP message needs way more than just specific  technical knowledge.

Here are our steps to efficiently obtain solutions on SAP messages:

1. Ensure System Access is Available Externally

Generally, all systems info and connections are already maintained in the Service Marketplace if you’re working at a customer site. The connections are usually maintained and opened by basis administrators. There should be service IDs that can be provided to SAP. All of this needs to exist before a message is opened.

2. Understand the Problem

Get a solid understanding of the issue if you are not the original reporter of the problem. This includes knowing where and when does the problem occur, the error message received, all the actions that lead up to the problem, what is the expected result, any incoming and outgoing connections, does it work one way and not another, what user ID is used, etc.

3. Re-create and Document the Problem

Recreate the problem and take screenshots of every single step from logging into the system to clicking on a button. Organize the screenshots in a document with a description for each screenshot step. Note down anything interesting or non-obvious that SAP may want to know, such as “clicking on Submit sends the data to back-end ECC system and calls the web service <service name> to perform data check operation”.

4. Download the System Trace

Note the time frame down during reproduction of the problem, and obtain the system trace for that time period. If there are connections to other systems during the recreation of this issue, obtain the traces for those systems in that time period as well.

5. Download the System Info

Obtain the versions information for the system, including the kernel, the database, as well as the components deployed on the system.

6. Open the Message in the Correct Component

This is an extremely critical step to getting timely feedback. When opening SAP messages, one of the first fields that is required is the Component field. This tells SAP on what specific component of that system does the problem exist. Getting this wrong means that the problem will not be looked at by the right team and needs to be forwarded to a different team, and that means more delays.

If you have no idea what component to choose, note down the components of the SAP notes which were most relevant to your issue during prior research. Then simply copy that component into your message’s Component field.

7. Attach Documents

Be sure to attach at least the following in your initial submission, or risk at least two weeks of wasted time:

• Step by step reproduction of the error with screenshots and descriptions
• System traces
• System info

8. Open Message with High Priority

If  at all possible, open the message with at least High priority. SAP replies to High priority messages at least twice as quickly as Medium priority messages, that is on average a 3-day improvement per reply. Forget about Low priority completely, you might as well not open a message if opened as Low. Simply enter High in the priority field, then describe in sincerity that the problem is holding up testing and impacting the project timeline.

9. Add Relevant Contacts

Don’t forget to enter the people who may want to receive emails on SAP’s communications in the Contacts & Notifications section. This also improves efficiency when you’re busy or unavailable, and someone else on your team can handle the message.

10. Be Polite but Firm and Clear

The language that you should use in a message is polite and clear. Be very organized with your approach to describing any steps you tried, and be clear in questions you may have. Avoid asking 10 questions in one reply, and avoid describing steps with block paragraphs. Use lists and numbered items. Always use “please” and “thank you”. I find that saying “We really appreciate all your help” goes a long way. SAP's support teams are comprised of human beings, too, so treat them like human beings.

Over the years, we have seen so much wasted time on software problems all because messages are poorly managed. Most of the issues come in the form of bad communication and organization skills, and a lack of understanding of the structure of SAP messages. Utilizing this guide is important because it can help contribute to a successful project that is on time and on budget. Check out our blog at http://hollandsystems.com/blog for more business and technical posts!

Sometimes we have an unexpected behavior during SAPFTP transfer.

Our system is Unicode and everything in SAP Kernel is Unicode too.

For example:

   A successful file will look like this:

*$L1$T11$S123456789012345678$U011$U02123grewgrw$

   An invalid file will look like this:

* $ L 1 $ T 1 3 $ S T L 1 3 0 6 9 2 $ U 0 1 k

Transfer is successful, but the final result is not what we want.

To solve this problem:

• Make sure SAPFTP version is Unicode. For that, run the command bellow.

C:\Program Files (x86)\SAP\FrontEnd\SAPgui>SAPftp.exe -V

SAPFTP Non-Unicode

@(#) $Id: //bas/720_REL/src/krn/ftp/ftpmain.c#7 $ SAP

@(#) $Id: //bas/720_REL/src/krn/ftp/ftp.c#2 $ SAP

@(#) $Id: //bas/720_REL/src/krn/ftp/ftpcmd.c#3 $ SAP

Here I give the example of my SAPFTP.exe in SAP Gui Installation. But the same command can be executed in Server Operating System level.

• Make sure the SAPFTP version, by the above command, and SAPFTP / SAPFTPA RFCs are Unicode too.

Go to SM59 -> TCP/IP connections -> SAPFTP -> Unicode tab -> "Communication Type with Target System"

Check if it's set to [x] Unicode or [x] Non-Unicode.

In case SAPftp.exe -V result in Unicode, change "Communication Type with Target System" to [x] Unicode.

In case SAPftp.exe -V result in Non-Unicode, change "Communication Type with Target System" to [x] Non-Unicode.

See more information about SAPFTP on note:

93042 - Problems with SAPFTP

For being able to use SSO authentication with AD on Windows 2008 R2 you should be at least on WPB 9.2 SP1.

We don't support R2 version on previous releases, enryption level is AES 256.

Regards,

Rodrigo