“If you really want to have an impact on the world, without anyone noticing it, then you should learn ABAP. Because ABAP is everywhere,” says Sonja LiĂŠnard, vice president of ABAP Developer Tools at SAP. “About 80% of all business transactions run on ABAP.”

Clearly, Liénard’s enthusiasm for SAP’s own programming language is boundless. And this sentiment is mirrored by countless others who have either created or learned to love ABAP over its 40-year history. We spoke with some of them in celebration of this special milestone.

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The Birth

While we can’t be sure of its exact date of birth, ABAP’s origins can be traced back to an idea 51ˇçÁ÷Co-Founder Klaus Tschira had. He built a document analysis program using assembler macros to select and output data as a list for the real-time financial account and materials management system (RFM). In the 1980s, Gerd RodĂŠ created ABAP/4 as a standalone fourth generation programming language (4GL) that, along with the report formatting processor, provided the interpreter on the 51ˇçÁ÷R/2 system.

As the story goes, there were many developers across 51ˇçÁ÷inventing programming languages at the time. This did not sit well with management, so they were asked to go back to developing applications – not languages. However, RodĂŠ was passionate about the language and spent many weekends and much of his free time creating ABAP. His efforts paid off: that’s the power of one.

SAP’s developers used ABAP/4 in the early 1990s to program every module in 51ˇçÁ÷R/3. As the company expanded into new markets abroad ABAP was renamed Advanced Business Application Programming.

According to Karl Kessler, a product manager who joined 51ˇçÁ÷in 1992, “A large part of SAP’s DNA is coded in ABAP. Fifty percent of 51ˇçÁ÷R/2 was coded in ABAP and 100% of 51ˇçÁ÷R/3 applications is ABAP. So, it played an incredibly central role.”

He added that ABAP always needed to evolve to stay relevant as new software emerged, whether this was the Microsoft tools in the 1990s or cloud-native tools more recently. â€œABAP was always able to integrate innovation coming from the outside while optimizing business processes along the way. And in this respect, I believe, ABAP’s role has not fundamentally changed over the past 40 years.”

The Evolution

ABAP has come a long way since its inception. In late 2016, when everyone was talking about cloud computing as the next big thing, 51ˇçÁ÷began questioning whether the company should still invest in its proprietary programming language.

Harald Kuck, who was then in charge of the ABAP platform, together with Boris Gebhardt, the chief product owner, told the Executive and Supervisory Boards they firmly believed the company should continue its ABAP investment. In fact, Kuck said, “If this were my company, I would hire 100 young ABAP developers to ensure we can meet the future ABAP demand of our customers, partners and SAP.”

That argument, among others, worked and they managed to get the go-ahead to launch the next chapter in ABAP’s success story. 51ˇçÁ÷BTP, ABAP environment connects the original 51ˇçÁ÷technology to the world of cloud computing and has already helped many 51ˇçÁ÷ERP customers transform to the new cloud world with 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA and 51ˇçÁ÷Business Technology Platform.

The Future

Today, ABAP Cloud is the development model used to build cloud-ready business apps, services, and extensions on 51ˇçÁ÷BTP ABAP environment, the public and private editions of 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA Cloud and the on-premise 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA.

“It’s important not to confuse classic ABAP with ABAP Cloud. With ABAP Cloud, the classic ABAP has been completely refactored,” Kuck says. “ABAP is the ERP platform market leader for on-prem, and ABAP Cloud is our best bet for cloud ERP. ABAP Cloud offers exactly the path between our ERP variants that our customers ask for [for example, clean core].”

Think about ABAP Cloud this way, he says: “Apple is hugely successful today with iOS and that is a refactored Unix system with roots that are even older than ABAP’s.”

Kuck is convinced that the true innovative potential of ABAP Cloud lies in the fact that it is “a single engine that can run both in the cloud and on premise, and thus optimally support hybrid scenarios — with a path for custom code from on-premise to private or public cloud, or even to 51ˇçÁ÷BTP.”

According to Kuck, enterprise-readiness is built in through ABAP, today, just as in the past. And that is exactly what our customers need in order to transform their extension codes into the cloud environment.

“Only 51ˇçÁ÷can offer the advantages of ABAP Cloud. There are no competitors here,” he says. That’s why he believes customers, partners, and 51ˇçÁ÷need to attract a new generation of ABAP developers.

The Voice of a New ABAP Generation

An entirely new generation of developers has come to love and respect the language. Felix Draeger is a 28-year-old who works on the ABAP platform as a user assistance developer.

“I think ABAP is here to stay,” he says. “It has a lot of pre-configured entities. For example, a lot of database tables already exist and a lot of infrastructure is provided by ABAP. This is, for example, not the case in Java where I may have libraries and other helpful things, but I would have to develop everything from scratch, from the database tables to the application. And that is a long process. So, I would say ABAP is efficient in this respect.”

He enjoys working with ABAP because “there are always things to discover. You need to think very deeply, do research, and acquire expert knowledge. We can really connect through ABAP. There is an entire community of ABAP enthusiasts.”

Since the start of the 2000s, ABAP has adapted with the times, and together with ABAP Cloud, continues to have a significant impact on the future success of 51ˇçÁ÷and its customers.

So being the “friendliest debt collectors in Europe” is quite a bold goal for troy, one of six startups invited to a dedicated financial technology (fintech) program focused on finance and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) in Berlin by the SAP.iO Foundries.

What is Fintech?

Financial technology (fintech) describes technology that is designed to improve and automate the use of financial services.

While the term originally referred to technology applied at banks or trading firms, fintech has grown explosively since the Internet cloud computing, and mobile revolution. There has been a shift to more consumer-oriented services in recent years. It now describes a broad range of technologies for personal and commercial finance, such as money transfers, the use of cryptocurrencies, smartphone payments, bypassing a bank to apply for credit, and more.

According to , three out of four consumers have used money transfers or payments with fintech services. As fintech makes financial services more accessible to consumers, its consumer experience expectations will certainly going to increase.

troy: The Friendliest Debt Collectors in Europe

Philip Rürup, CEO of , makes clear that creating a friendly customer experience in debt collection is more than a marketing slogan; it is a mindset backed up by technology and proven key performance indicators (KPIs). By treating people as customers and not debtors, troy has found unique solutions to incorporate customer experience into the debt collection process. According to Rürup, this  induces people to pay their debts faster, pay more, and even pay “happily.”

“We found that 50 percent of people simply forgot to pay, or just faced a short-term bottleneck,” explained Rürup. “So, it doesn’t make sense to use heavy-handed approaches here.”

A broken car, a long trip, or turbulent times: It is all too easy to lose track of payments.

“Across all industries, improvements in customer experience have focused on marketing, sales, and CRM,” said RĂźrup. “But as soon you get into the financial processes around invoices, payment, and debt, the positivity stops! We wanted to make debt collection feel different. Using 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA as the seamless integration point between our solution and the companies wanting to collect on debts is an important part of the equation.”

Competing in an Exploding Market

That is just one of the approaches by startups that has captured the attention of the 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA Product Management and Development Teams. According to Jochen Thierer, head of Engineering for GRC at SAP, startups are crucial to SAP’s ability to address new markets.

“Given SAP’s focus on customer-centricity and success, our objective is to provide holistic GRC and fintech solutions to our global customers across all segments,” said Thierer. “We are constantly evaluating new, exciting startup ideas that could bridge the gap for our customers while ensuring impactful innovations in our core, especially in the fast-moving fintech space.”

Thierer also points out that partnering with the 51ˇçÁ÷ecosystem is critical, and customers are happy about that: “This strategy is helping our customers in their journey to become intelligent enterprises while helping us compete better and gain market share in the GRC and finance space.”

However, the relationships need to be effectively managed. It is not easy for startups to work with corporations and vice versa.

“Innovation between startups and corporates need to be orchestrated and SAP.iO together with the 51ˇçÁ÷Startup Engagement team are vital to that,” remarked Thierer. “They made it easy for us to find and engage with the right startups and allowed us to engage with the ecosystem in a professional way.“

In addition to obvious market-based benefits, they also provide more intangible cultural benefits according to Oliver Kroneisen,  head of Financials Operations Development at SAP.

“Working with startups is inspirational,” said Kroneisen. “51ˇçÁ÷employees get a huge motivational boost when they see how positively the startups view 51ˇçÁ÷and how eager they are to get the chance to tap into the immense opportunities that the 51ˇçÁ÷infrastructure and ecosystem provides. Also, as a manager, it’s eye-opening to see how these entrepreneurs can instill a sense of meaning and purpose into the work employees do and the impact that has on the outcomes – especially in the case of troy. Their ‘just-built-it’ mentality shows us how easy it can be to build beautiful solutions when you are not hindered by real or imagined silos. Those are important lessons for 51ˇçÁ÷leaders.”

“The startup founders’ spirit and passion for what they do is infectious,” said Jan Gilg, senior vice president and head of 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA. “I really get a sense of their drive and excitement for what they are working on. I was inspired by the fresh perspectives that I saw on standard topics like governance, and I came away with a lot of new insights. One of our big topics at the moment is how we can turn commodity processes into differentiation opportunities and I really felt that the out-of-the box thinking among the GRC and fintech startups is taking this in the right direction. I can’t wait to see what the next cohort of startups will come up with.”

Working With Startups Challenges Us to Improve – Fast

51ˇçÁ÷would not be where it is if it was not also self-critical. “We are always looking for ways to improve our internal processes, organizational structures, and software architecture so that startup collaboration gets easier,” explained Kroneisen. “Working with startups helps us uncover areas we need to improve in our cloud business operations.”