SAP Cloud Platform: Realizing a Million Dreams in 2019

One of my favourite films of last year (late 2017, very early in 2018) was The Greatest Showman with a music soundtrack my whole family have sung along to with gusto. One of my favourite songs from the film is called ‘A Million Dreams’. I often like to draw parallels with movies/lyrics/words in songs (due to my love of music) and attribute them to working life situations. In this case – SAP Cloud Platform for me continues to realise these million dreams and 2018 was no exception. Maybe bjoern.goerke could sing this tune at this year's TechEd?? That would be great and I am surely not the only one who would love to see this!!! Just an idea :-).

The song lyrics for me really summarise the year that I've had and also applies to what I believe is in store in 2019. I've included some of the main lyrics that resonate.

The brightest colors fill my head

This to me relates to the volume of new, exciting functionality that has and continues to be delivered - SAP Cloud Platform Functions, SAP Mobile Cards, Open Connectors, Updates to Workflow and Business Rules, Intelligent Enterprise with SAP Leonardo - Machine Learning, AI, Blockchain, Predictive Analytics and of course Robot Process Automation (RPA).

A million dreams are keeping me awake

This to me relates to the learning opportunities on offer - so much to learn, practice and deliver - seriously no time for sleep. With the great amount of developer missions, tutorials, openSAP courses and ongoing customer projects in 2018 I believe this will only continue in 2019. This also relates to the Community activities and contributions - helping others realize their goals.

I think of what the world could be
A vision of the one I see
A million dreams is all it's gonna take
A million dreams for the world we're gonna make

I particularly love the last line - while SAP provides roadmaps for all of the solutions like SAP Cloud Platform it is important that we all contribute where we can. This includes the full ecosystem - Customers, Partners, Community Members. The new revamped SAP Community made some serious inroads in 2018 and the improvements have been great. As far as contributions there are customer engagement initiatives out there to provide feedback on and I myself have provided #FeatureRequestPhil items to help in the realizing of a million dreams.

The overall vision is great and we can all see major progress but we can only reach it if we all work and make it happen together. (Phil Cooley)

I predicted at the end of 2017 that customer demand for SAP Cloud Platform (SAPCP) would go crazy and glad to report that it went way beyond my expectations – so much so I had one of the busiest years I can remember. I spent a large amount of my time architecting SAP Cloud Platform solutions as well as technically setting up the cloud and on-premise environments for a large amount of customers. There were so many highlights it would take me 10 pages to report them all ? but I will focus on some of the major ones to provide a flavor of the year that was.

Customer Project Highlights

From a customer project point of view I spent most of this year on a major warehouse mobility project that went live in November delivering 11 warehouse management applications on SAP Cloud Platform. This was a huge success and the best part was that my colleagues and I learnt a heap from it. We made some mistakes along the way but we are better for it. I wrote a blog on my experiences around building resilient applications which detailed the lessons learned. DREMTAC is the key!

At the same time I worked on another major project to migrate applications from an on-premise landscape to SAP Cloud Platform with the implementation of an amazing freestyle site that was design-led. A quick learning for me from this project related to Cloud Domains and the setting up of cool and easy to remember URL's to improve the user's experience. Also learnt about Java quotas and how to manage them between the different environments - this was cool to learn.

Other projects gave me insight to SAP Mobile Cards, My Inbox to provide Purchase Order Approvals, and SAP Cloud Platform Workflow to provide a proof of concept around vendor changes. I was part of a team that delivered Vendor Onboarding apps as well as an app that managed access for Field Service Contractors which was really interesting. I worked on implementing SAP Fiori Cloud CRM applications for a customer which was technically challenging and finished off the year working on Shipment processing applications which will continue into 2019.

One of the toughest projects I worked on (in my spare time) in 2018 involved an integration project with SAP ERP, SAP PO and SAP Hybris eCommerce. Seriously limited in time I could allocate to this project but I learnt a heap of lessons out of this experience that I will taking into any of the future projects I work on. Learning from mistakes can only make me better.

Overall, I consolidated my knowledge around major security elements in SAPCP and continued to ramp up my solutioning expertise - architecting different mobile application solutions to different business requirements. In early 2019 I am working on setting up High Availability environments and will also start working on Disaster Recovery scenarios - really interesting stuff. Look out for a blog on this in the first few months.

OpenSap Highlights

What a year for OpenSAP - celebrating the 5 year anniversary as well as the offering of a large amount of really cool courses. The preparation, expertise and passion to bring these courses to the masses is truly amazing and very much appreciated.

I completed a number of courses during 2018 and by far the most enjoyable one was the SAP Cloud Platform Version Control with Git openSAP course by arnaldo.cavazos. This was seriously great and would recommend every SAP Cloud Platform developer to complete it. An absolute must - especially if you are on a project that involves a number of developers all accessing the same codebase. I wrote a blog post reviewing the course and have included the link below. One of my intentions in writing blog posts is to get people talking about it and providing