Today, every company already has an ERP or some system to automate all or some of its business management processes; otherwise, companies would not be viable or competitive. For this reason, if we (speaking from a software house perspective) intend to offer our services within this reality, we must integrate to what already exists.
As I usually say, “green fields don’t exist anymore,” which means it is no longer possible to arrive at a company and tell them to throw away everything they have because we will start a development from scratch. Having said that, these solutions have evolved into certain standard packages that we call ERPs, of different sizes and quality.

Therefore, I understand that ERPs have evolved positively, encapsulating the most common business processes and offering companies ready-made, proven solutions that they can evaluate by looking at their success or failure in other organizations, in order to choose the best one or the one that is most suitable for a reality. 

What is currently becoming clear is that reality is increasingly dynamic and technology solutions must evolve at previously unthinkable speed
. Therefore, while the modernization or paradigm change of certain business processes is more stable over time, there are others whose transformation must be achieved at an accelerated pace.

Even new technologies that emerge abruptly (with exponential adoption growth) affect and change the business process itself, and the company must adapt to it.
As I see it, for companies the evolution is closely related to the idea that Gartner introduced in 2014 and called “Bimodal IT”: there are parts of the solution which are more stable over time, supported by a team dedicated to them –the more easily adaptable they are, according to the tools they were made with, the better.

At the same time, an area of the company (or outsourced team) uses the right tools to develop new solutions, in an agile way while enabling the modernization of strategic operational processes and the incorporation of new technologies
such as mobile, Machine Learning, and others.
In this context, Low-Code
tools, Agility, and Integration are Key Features
.

The role of GeneXus for SAP Systems in this context and news regarding GeneXus 17

Against this backdrop, in recent years we at GeneXus have decided to bet heavily on SAP
, one of the major players in the world of ERPs. We are confident that GeneXus can contribute greatly to this new paradigm for creating innovative developments in an agile way around SAP ERP, with integration that is natural, certified by SAP, and simple. 

This is based on 5 pillars:

1) Provide all the power of GeneXus to create applications integrated to SAP ERP, with no need to have in-depth knowledge of SAP specifics. 

2) Generate these applications using Fiori
(SAP Design System
) by default, with patterns that streamline the process (both for web and for Smart Devices), so that the applications generated with GeneXus have the same look & feel as the ERP.  

3) Use SAP HANA Database
, the first in-memory DBMS supported by GeneXus, with no need to have any prior knowledge of this technology. 

4) Being able to automatically deploy the applications generated with GeneXus for SAP Systems
to the SAP cloud (Sap Cloud Platform
). 

5) Finally, but not less important, enable the GeneXus AI
module to extend the ERP by incorporating Machine Learning
solutions. 

As for new developments in GeneXus 17 related to GeneXus for SAP, we have good news:

. Update of the GeneXus Fiori pattern to Fiori 3.0.


. Possibility of incorporating SAP UI5 controls to developments.


. Automatic deployment to Sap Cloud Platform, in previous versions, supported only SCP Neo environment and now SAP Cloud Foundry has also been added.


. Integration with SAP Business One is now possible through OData.

Join us for the release of GeneXus 17 via streaming #GeneXus 17LIVE!

Mark October 20 on your calendar here