[tastroder]

While I get that sentiment I don't really see the ecosystem much worse than vendor lockin at any of the modern PaaS providers from a tech perspective. They always allowed integrators relatively extensive API access to their table model, last time I had to integrate that years ago the only hurdle was a bit of interfacing between the report / ABAP world and exposing it as a web service. Even management / security facilities were, albeit usually clunky, what you expect from a modern ecosystem. These days they seem to offer relatively modern and off the shelf APIs for quite a few of these tasks, especially for their cloud based offerings. I'm not sure that they see it as a threat, rather they want to be the single point of truth and lots of projects (completely separated from any tech aspect) would circumvent that.

Now was that a pain? Yes, sure. Especially the whole legal/certification/consultant crap you need to buy into alongside the software. But honestly, at least here in Germany, SAP ABAP/Java developers and consultants are easy to come by. Most of the problems I've seen in SAP related integrations are process related, not as much tech. If you're dealing with a customer that's already up and running in that ecosystem chances are that they already know their pain points, it's not really any different than any other large B2B integration in the space.