James and I talked to Holger Bruchelt, host of the awesome SAP on Azure podcast (also watch on YouTube) and all around swell guy. Holger put us on the right path with thoughts about platforms and infrastructure, integration and Power Platform, and being a futuristic nerd with GitHub Copilot (a perennial favorite topic of ours). He’s just as fun to talk to when the recorders have stopped, so we hope you enjoy our conversation as much as we did. 

Highlights

• Closing out the “Multi-Vendor Mess” series
• Former SAP employee now in program management for architecture and integration
• Started understanding the mashup space all the way back with the MS/SAP partnered product Duet
• SAP IT runs SAP on Azure
• Recurring theme across SAP everything: setting up single sign-on is always a challenge
• Consistent UX is a best-of-breed challenge
• Teams integration is top-of-mind for lots of customers in the integration space
• Holger emphasizes that fusion teams are a thing that people should do more of. We agree.
• Holger shares my enormous enthusiasm for the new AI tools for making programming better, e.g. GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Power Platform also taking a bite of this

Money Quotes

Holger

I honestly think the Power Platform is an amazing extension to what you can do with SAP. 

You can empower users in the company to create their own applications in the Power Platform.

James

We all had this vision of what could be, but there were technical obstacles. I don’t think any of us predicted how fast the cloud would unlock the bottlenecks. 

Paul

The degree to which SAP data is the core to processes is astounding to me. 

Simplifying how you get and interact with SAP data is a trillion-dollar idea by itself.