Business applications are central to any organization because they control processes, manage business objects, and can respond to changes immediately. However, their software architecture is far from trivial as it needs to cover not only complex economic rules and business networks but also needs to ensure enterprise-ready properties like scalability, elasticity, security, trustfulness, and high availability.
On top of this, there are many trends that change how we build software in general. Not so long ago, the terms Cloud Computing or In-Memory Data Management were not well known. To keep pace with the latest technologies, it is not enough that only software developers stay current, but also businesses need to understand the bigger picture. It is crucial for companies to adopt the latest technology trends, not for technology’s sake but to improve their existing business processes, as well as to solve new problems and deliver experiences that were not possible before.
For these reasons, this lecture introduces the domain of business applications, their underlying architecture, and trends in technology. We describe the properties of enterprise applications and how business requirements (including accounting, logistics, human resources, and customer management) are implemented. The lecture conveys a good mixture of business administration basics, software implementation, and the technical understanding of the underlying system architecture. The interactive exercises give the opportunity to try out an enterprise resource planning system, look down to the data level and implement a basic application on an enterprise cloud.
Furthermore, please join Professor Hasso Plattner, SAP Co-founder and Chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board, together with several top-class guests, in a compact block week at the end of the semester to learn more about the technical architecture behind business applications, such as SAP S/4HANA (Cloud), and have fruitful discussions with them about the latest trends and concepts in the software industry.
