Platforms and App Delivery with Matthias Steiner

Switched On with Paul Modderman and James Wood

James and I talked to Matthias Steiner for the fourth episode in our second season. He took to the SAP Community blogs to defend low-code/no-code (and later reiterated at diginomica), and we took notice. We’d been fans previously because of his influence on the various cloud platform gyrations at SAP, and of course because he’s a willing Twitter prognosticator. We dove in on low/no-code and other platform things, for a great time.

Highlights

• 17 years at SAP — 10ish as software architect for SAP customer development, rest in the SAP Cloud Platform/BTP space
• Now Chief Product Officer at Neptune Software, doing all kinds of low-code shenanigans

The triathlete in his business attire

• prefers “rapid app development” to “low/no code” as a descriptor of the modern tool evolution
• Nobody says “Yes!” to the question “Is your IT department delivering all the apps your business needs to go forward?”
• Says — and we agree — SAP is best at the boring-but-hard stuff.
• NOT a blockchain guy. :)
• Believes it’s all about culture. We agree.

Money Quotes

Matthias

“Platform” means you need to see MANY people benefit from it. Where are the partner stories?

IT needs to change from being the one that delivers to the one that empowers.

James

Amazing developers can go in and build apps, but if you look at it from a budget perspective…[after a project cycle] what do we have? Fairly pretty CRUD applications. Look at all we’ve left on the table.

Paul

As a business user, you should not want code, you should want applications.