About the SAP Certification

In December 2019 three of our colleagues got certified as SAP Development Associates for the SAP CDC and I invited, one of them, László Miklósik to explain the process.

Emőke: Well first of all, let’s discuss what is the SAP Certificate. What does it mean that you possess this accreditation?
László: With this knowledge we are prepared to implement SAP Customer Data Cloud (also known as CDC or its former name, Gigya) for various business domains. Using it we solve the authentication and consent management concerns and also provide a smooth end user onboarding process via progressive profiling. Then the companies onboarded to SAP CDC can focus on developing their core business without being distracted by the technicalities of user registration, authentication, profile and credentials self-service, consent management or GDPR compliancy.

E: What is a SAP Customer Data Cloud and a SAP Cloud strategy?
László: SAP is huge software vendor, known from a long time for their ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning) system, but their applications/platform include CRM(Customer Relationship Management), HRMS(Human Resource Management System), e-commerce, marketing, sales, integration software and more. Their applications are highly integrated with each-other and they are very flexible with integrating with non-SAP software systems as well (to leverage what is already in the market, standards, protocols, APIs etc.). They developed their own relational database(HANA) and for the last few years they are heavily migrating their offering from on-premises to the cloud. S/4 HANA Cloud is where their ERP evolved and C/4 HANA Cloud is where their CRM and eCommerce platforms evolved, these are served as SaaS; but the SAP Cloud also contains PaaS components(a Cloud Foundry-based Platform as a Service) and various services built on top of these. Until a few years back, SAP used to be a closed community, but since then they become quite open use open source technology and to share knowledge about their platform, they also made many trainings publicly available.
Since SAP bought Gigya, a leader in the so called CIAM domain, they unified the user experience, by bringing together the four components of the SAP Customer Cloud (C/4 HANA): Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, putting SAP CDC in the middle to provide the crucial consumer-identity information to all these. The Customer Cloud helps companies to provide transparent, flexible and secure digital experience to their customers.

E: Why did you choose SAP Customer Data Cloud?
László: Our IAM related experience started with IAM for workforce(employees), and then the market shifted towards CIAM(Customer Identity & Access Management). Gigya was one of the pioneers from the CIAM domain, so we thought it’s best to learn from the most experienced.

On the other hand, together with our partner in Netherlands, QforIT- experts in SAP integration and SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) we can offer a complete and robust solution to customers covering both Integration and IAM.

E: What kind of skills are covered with this SAP Certificates?
László: We learned about the components of SAP CDC: Identity, Profile, Consent. We got familiar with the configuration of the related features from its administration console, their REST and JavaScript APIs, saw how RBA (risk-based authentication) has been modeled, worked with registration, consent management and user provisioning.

E: How was the training and the exam?
László: For the training part we participated in a virtual classroom, which presented the features of the platform and we also had to complete several exercises. Afterwards we did some individual studying and exercises, along with discussions in the team. The exam was a quite interesting experience, we didn’t have to travel for it, not even to an examination center. It was a remote supervised exam, where you had to prove your identity using your ID card before you got to the multiple choice test part, which ran in a secure browser(which you could only exit at the end of the exam).

E: How will this benefit your future work?
László: For implementing SAP CDC at customers, this knowledge was really a prerequisite, but besides the specific CDC knowledge and how it achieves GDPR compliance, we also got more insight into pragmatic CIAM and are able to efficiently compare related offerings. We also have an idea on where the solution will evolve in the next period (for example B2B features).

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