Kraftwerk and SAP platforms
We continue a series (part 1, part 2, part 3) in combining digital music with business engineering technology as they do relate to each other especially in the case of Kraftwerk and SAP. Kraftwerk invented new equipment at Kling Klang Studio, creating a digital platform to mix a collection of electronic instruments. SAP created a platform to customize business applications.
SAP invented ABAP to aggregate a cluster of domain objects as a single unit, creating an integration for a business application platform. An example may be an order and its line-items, these will be separate objects, but it’s useful to treat the order (together with its line items) as a single aggregate. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DDD_Aggregate.html
Understanding the design for aggregates is the key to the development of the business applications platforms.
All business systems above have proven highly durable and influential. Creating long term success by combining standard technologies with proprietary core technologies and dialing in a great experience. An example is declarative DSLs combined with engineering the core to integrate aggregates with capabilities to add, plugin, or customize functionality quickly.
Some observations:
Pick and Epic are based on multivalue databases, NoSQL databases, not fantastic for consistency in financial transactions. Giving rise to E.F. Codd’s 12 rules (0–12) and the relational database design. Hasso Plattner et. al built on ABAP to implement real-time business logic in aggregates for business applications. built on E.F. Codd’s work leading to the Oracle database. Not until Salesforce learned during the dot com, perhaps a good guess, reaching back to multivalue databases to modify the relational database by putting an Oracle-on-Oracle database in SQL on NoSQL pattern with Lucene and reverse indexes for aggregate functions was multitenancy with horizontal scaling solved. Michael Stonebraker solved problems with relational databases winning the Turing Prize by creating an object-oriented database solving sharding issues with MVCC giving rise to Workday. Influenced by Ruby-on-Rails and Project Green the .NET stack took some time to react. Acumatica, Exact, and Xero all adopted metadata-driven objects and aggregates. Amazon, influenced by Bigtable, created DynamoDB and the NoSQL movement, separating RDBMS and aggregates with microservices for scalability. Notably, SAP created HANA for real-time ABAP objects, another way of arriving at Stonebreakers MVCC; multicurrency improvements to solve ACID in sharded relational databases, giving rise to Workday.
Rarely have business application platforms have been highly successful without an ability to add and customize functionality. As customers rewire business for the post-COVID-19 era, platforms likely need to morph to combining blockchain technologies for data security and usage-based licensing with a programming language designed for the cloud. Suited to complex domains, the kind that also benefits from data-driven domain design.
Speculatively, it would be interesting to learn how Bret Taylor, may combine web technologies from Quip to solve data security and digital licensing issues and user experience in any future Salesforce platform. The same speculation at SAP.
On an ending note, just as electronic music has morphed to new platforms — SoundCloud, Spotify, TikTok. We expect a horse race is already underway not to become the next ASK ManMan, Cullinet, or PeopleSoft. Generational change has SAP in the capable hands of a new leadership team.
— Clive Boulton (@iC)
