I am celebrating 30 years of SAP technical consultancy and professional working life in July 2025.
1995 was the year I graduated and started working for Anderson Consulting ( now Accenture ) as a junior consultant.
21 years old and as ‘green’ as they come.
After a month of training for the famous introduction course in Chicago in America, there was an urgent need for a developer on a new local project, so I got ‘introduced’ to SAP - software I never heard about - and had a ‘crash course’ to program in ABAP, much to my dislike a ‘cobol’ alike programming language in some weird VI based editor … and ’the rest is history’ … and oh I never got to follow that introduction course in America but I did eventually go there twice to assist in a 3 week ABAP development introduction course.
Time sure does fly when one is having fun.
Luckily, ABAP has evolved of the years into a vary mature Object-Oriented programming language with closer resemblance to the likes of JAVA and C#. And the editor luckily followed as well, from the VI editor alike via the newly SE80 environment in the nineties and later on the introduction of Eclipse with the ADT plugin. SAP Business studio appeared in the cloud for Fiori and CAP related developments and Visual Code with ABAP support is on the horizon as we speak.
At the risk of sounding ‘old’ - I have seen the coming of the Internet age with SAP Internet Transaction Server, the internet B2B boom with SAP business connector and SAP XI, the emergence of JAVA with Java Web Dynpro and SAP Portal, the appearance of sunny ABAP clouds and SAAS solutions and now the ’end of software development times’ with AI LLM, AI agents and AI Joule.
Life hasn’t been dull .. that’s for sure.
We will see what comes next … I am quite sure that AI & robotics will have a profound impact on our society in the years to come. It will eventuall mean that my days as a ‘software developer’ are coming to an end and I will have transitioned towards a new kinf of role …
Steven
