9 skills every SAP Basis engineer should learn (especially #9)

A few years ago we shared a list of skills every SAP Basis engineer should learn. The market (and the world to be honest) have changed quite dramatically since, and with them, so has the skill set that exceptional SAP Basis engineers and managers need. Looking to the future of SAP Basis, the skills will evolve even further. In this blog, we’ve tried listing some skills you might want to invest in learning.
Some of the skills in this list require more time or even certification, while others could be learned fairly fast. Having these skills under your belt will not only make you better at your job, but they might even land you a shiny “Employee of the Month” badge. 

So lets start...

1. Managing Public and Hybrid Clouds

As more companies migrate their SAP workload to the cloud, having the understanding and know-how to manage these environments becoming crucial. All the major hyperscalers - AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure offer their own certification classes, as well as several other independent online sites.
Keep in mind that in most cases some elements of your SAP landscape will remain on-premise, so you can’t neglect your knowledge about SAP automation operation of hybrid SAP landscapes.
No matter which direction you choose, cloud certifications are sure to take your career to the next level.

2. Integration and Management of SAP SaaS Solutions

In a complex SAP landscape, you’ll often find Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions such as Concur, Ariba or SuccessFactors, as well as non-SAP enterprise SaaS solutions that are integrated with your SAP systems. Investing in understanding how to best integrate it with your company core applications as well as how to manage, govern and secure SaaS products is an essential skill.

3. AIOps

Gartner defines AIOps in their research as “AIOps platforms enhance infrastructure and operation (I&O) leaders’ decision making by contextualizing large volumes of varied and volatile data. I&O leaders should use AIOps platforms for refining performance analysis across the application life cycle, as well as for augmenting IT service management and automation.”

However, there are specific AIOps solutions for SAP landscape management you should start looking into. In a recent study ASUG held it was found that 64% of organizations are planning to deploy AIOps for Monitoring and analytics (59%), upgrades and patching (56%), performance management (49%), business process management (44%), audit and compliance support (42%). In order to keep up your Basis skills, you should start exploring AIOps solutions.

Don’t stay behind, learn what AIOps for SAP is.

4. ServiceNow (and CMDB in particular)

ITSM tools help infrastructure and operations teams to manage IT support services, they are usually heavily used by IT service desks and IT service delivery functions to support the tasks and workflows for processes including incident, request, problem, change, service level, knowledge and configuration management. In a latest Gartner ITSM Magic quadrant, ServiceNow came as a leader of this market

5. Basis Automation

No, we are not looking to get you out of your job. You need to think about how to work smarter and better utilize your expertise and knowledge to improve the organization. SAP Monitoring used to be a manual, error-prone process. Not anymore..using SAP monitoring automation you can now automate mundane SAP monitoring tasks and use your skills and knowledge to solve issues (that could be detected earlier using automation) or plan and deploy how to innovate your IT operations to improve your organization IT efficiency, save them costs or increase security.

6. Orchestration Automation

We talked about automation, but while automation refers to a single task, orchestration arranges tasks to optimize workflows.

For example, orchestrating SAP start/stop means not only doing one action of stopping it, but also testing various elements post actions and running some scripts. In the cloud, orchestration is often key to ensuring that automated spin-up activities like auto-scaling take place in the right order, with the right security rules and permissions in place.

Together, automation and orchestration can help reduce IT costs, ramp up productivity, and free up personnel focus for more strategic pursuits. However, choosing the right tools to succeed with both takes time and research, but having this knowledge will put you and your career ahead.
Udemy, as well as various other organizations, offer Orchestration classes - while those will typically be IT generic, it will allow you to understand and implement it in your SAP environment.

7. Kubernetes and Containerization

Think of a container as a single process wrapped by a stripped-down operating system. As such, like a process, it may be very short or long-living. In any case, it's ephemeral, so whatever you do inside the container is gone once it stops. The de-facto standard for containers is Docker.

Like an operating system automates the handling of processes, there are automation environments (or orchestration). While there are a few, Kubernetes emerged as the one most widely used.

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.

You may install Kubernetes on your laptop and orchestrate containers, but that probably doesn't scale well. You can run it on other Linux servers or even on bare metal servers. And yes, every major cloud provider offers it: AWS EKS and AWS Fargate, Azure AKS, Google Kubernetes Engine (in fact, Google developed Kubernetes), RedHat OpenShift, SuSE CaaS, Oracle and even SAP Cloud Platform announced it.

Kubernetes and containerization can be used in an SAP environment in a variety of ways and most often it goes along with cloud migration.

This list provides you with some places you can hone your skills.

This is the original version of this post, while a few years past since, many of them are still valid skills you should consider learning.

As companies are tightening their budget in an effort to increase efficiencies and save money, time is becoming even shorter and keeping up with new technologies becomes even harder. Our new year resolution is to explore, to learn more, and to make sure we are growing and becoming better. This list of new skills you can learn without investing months or years is our way of making this resolution come true.

1. Learn SAP

Expand your knowledge of SAP. Pick one subject within the huge SAP ecosystem and learn about it using 10 SAP free tutorials

2. Machine learning

Everyone is talking about Machine learning, learn about how machine learning can be applied to solve business problems. Do it in this free class about Enterprise Machine Learning in a Nutshell. Oh, and the shirt? you can buy it on Amazon.

Blockchain is all over the internet. Learn what problems blockchain solves and what opportunities it enables. Take this introductory-level course, learn what blockchain is and what it might mean to you. Jonathan Reichental—named one of the world's top 100 CIOs in 2017—dives into blockchain technology from a conceptual perspective. Don’t have time for a class? Download the executive brief Making the Next Moves with Blockchain.

4. ABAP Programming for SAP Fiori Apps in SAP S/4HANA

Last TechEd SAP launched a new ABAP Programming Model in SAP S/4HANA. Learn more about how the back-end for highly standardized, cloud-ready SAP Fiori apps is built in SAP S/4HANA and understand how to combine new and proven technologies like CDS, BOPF and SAP. Getting Started with ABAP Programming Model for SAP Fiori Apps in SAP S/4HANA

5. SAP Leonardo

SAP Leonardo is an umbrella term for a number of SAP technologies, all built on top of its open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering called SAP Cloud Platform. What is SAP Leonardo? Everything you need to know about SAP’s Leonardo platform in this great article

6. SAP HANA Migration

SAP customers need to be on SAP HANA in the near future. The most advanced organizations running SAP have already taken the necessary steps to migrate to HANA. Learn about best practice for HANA monitoring migration

7. Internet of Things (IoT)

Gartner’s research reveals that 20.4B smart devices will be connected by IoT by 2020. IoT or Internet of Things has been discussed for many years, but now it actually looks like it is coming for real. Watch this movie about real-life IoT business application or join this SAP IoT community

8. HANA 2.0

Yes, we know you are still wrapping your head around HANA, but HANA 2.0 is already out there. This in-depth tutorial takes you through HANA 2.0 technical architecture, information modeling, reporting, user management, security and new features and functionalities.

9.That thing you always wanted

Learn to cook, to swim, or learn a new language. Learn a new skill that is not related to your work but makes you happy. Here is a wonderful list of 11 'easy' skills you can learn in just a week

Let us know what other links should be on this list!

One last note...we now offer limited time free use of Avantra. In minutes (yes, minutes) you can automate your SAP operations. Give it a try