Ten years of… ummm… Nevermind.

I was thinking how will I name this article. “Ten years of ABAP” is kind of selfish but well, here I say that anyways. “Ten years of fun” is not true, for SAP can be very stress-inducing. So, nevermind, let me tell the story.

Ten years ago, on a cold February morning we got off the train to Moscow and rushed to subway to be on our first ABAP training on time. We were six, a newly formed team of a software services company, to get prepared to do technical SAP work. Just one of us knew something about SAP from practice, and the rest, including myself, didn’t have a clue. The week before I was sitting in front of Visual C++, the most advanced development environment then and now, and could not imagine downgrading to simple tools that SAP then offered. I decided to quit my job and take another one, to try this fancy business software.

In 1998, SAP was a hot skill in computer industry and my company (my new company) already had many people with SAP skills. But they were to busy to switch to a new project, so the management decided to take a risk hiring inexperienced people and investing into training. Somehow, when they called SAP Russia to arrange an on-demand training in ABAP, SAP folks got very excited, mostly because they wanted to know who the hell are we, if we are not SAP clients. In my small native country, there was exactly ONE client of SAP at that time. But the potential revenue prospects dissolved all their doubts (not that I’ve heard of widely going piracy of R/3) and they offered a BC400 on demand and then BC415/BC425 from the official schedule.

Moscow never stops offering surprises to its visitors. Enormous city with so many things going on. Just couple of weeks before, I was visiting the office of my (previous) company in Provence, Southern France and it was quite a fun to see the price tags in Moscow easily translated to French Francs, for things easily comparable like McDonald’s, for exchange rate was 1 to 1. The crash of Russian market several months later has corrected that. So, we took the subway, then a bus, both considerably cheaper than in France, and got off in some high-rise residential area to look for the office of SAP Consult CIS. SAP Russia was a company selling software, and SAP Consult did consulting and training. Because of some stupid law or may be for tax convenience, SAP decided to split into two companies there.

SAP Consult was (and maybe still is) located in a former kindergarten that they’ve bought and completely renovated. They didn’t have those small desks and chairs, no. They had nice classrooms with the latest equipment and a broadband connection to SAP Germany. Though SAP already announced the R/3 4.0, we were trained on 3.1, to start our work with 3.0 then, transitioning to 3.1 one year later.

We all were impressed by the training. The second week (we did that two weeks later actually) was not as good because it was with different instructor. But BC400 was impressive. I did not have a much of specialized training and this was the first one then, but this guy who gave it was outstanding. And he wasn’t even a professional educator! His main job was consulting and we had several years of SAP experience. (I wonder when did SAP start its business in Russia).

Back from our training, we continued slowly. Fortunately for us, we worked on a project of IBM Storage Systems Division, where they have extremely well organized processes and lots of competent and ready to help folks. So, after maybe one year, we could say that we understand something in SAP or ABAP world. The SAP instance we were working on was by that time one of the biggest and it that was a well known project, even mentioned by SAP itself in one of their “success stories”.

Working was fun. I could not imagine that I will have a chance to use my (almost dead) knowledge of mainframes on this project that I still had from university. But then, R/3 3.x still had this good old ABAP editor where you had to type a command to get more empty lines to write your code, or to paste your text (ok, there were some keyboard shortcuts too, but not for everything). And in addition to standard corporate mail on Lotus Notes, we all got to learn simple things in the same mainframe environment that comes with OS/360 and its descendants. IBM used it as a backup and for some internal applications. Funny, I still had some “tricks” in my head like “if your screen is stuck and reacts strange to anything you type, which means you got out of normal command environment, type IPL PTS and then you’ll be fine”. SAP was considerably easier then, for it had a menu and was more intuitive in 1998.

Looking back I would say that working with on SAP implementation is not as appealing as developing a standalone software, what I did before jumping on ABAP. I’m tired of mentioning that SAP still doesn’t have any useful documentation that helps ABAPers to map business and technical sides of work. But it is nevertheless rewarding (not only from financial incentive point of view). And it’s good to feel how your single line of code can kick the multimillion multiterabyte system in the butt. Ten years didn’t change that – just try to trash your T000 table with DELETE and you’ll know what I mean.