When SAP laid off 4,400 of its employees in early March, the company noted that the restructuring was part of a "fitness program." If the SAP layoffs and published reports indicate anything, it's that the vendor appears to be doubling down on its cloud strategies -- and jettisoning advanced development on its HANA database and ABAP programming language.

While analysts believe that customers will still receive support for products, early signs show that SAP may be more invested in opening up its SAP Cloud Platform to sit on top of other databases in the future.

The March SAP layoffs are not the end of the vendor's restructuring. According to published reports, SAP cut 446 jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area, the majority of which are software jobs. SAP isn't the only large tech company letting go of employees: PayPal and Oracle are also trimming their workforces, but not as much as SAP.

A hit to ABAP The SAP layoffs hit Rich Heilman and Thomas Jung, both highly regarded ABAP developers, as well as Bjoern Goerke, chief technology officer and head of the SAP Cloud Platform business. However, Heilman accepted another job in SAP, according to a company spokesperson, and on April 1, Jung tweeted that he was moving to the technology and architecture team in the SAP Cloud Business Group. This may be part of its cloud strategy because, to customize applications in the cloud, developers need to build ABAP on a platform-as-a-service model, then integrate with applications and interfaces -- a workaround that would be specific only to SAP because of the proprietary nature of the ABAP language, according to Duy Nguyen, senior director and analyst for applications procurement and operation at Gartner. Rich Heilman and Thomas Jung were the two programmers that the ABAP community looked toward for help with issues that arose when developing in ABAP, Nguyen said. "Even though there's a bit of cleaning house, the goal [for SAP] is to look forward and recruit new blood in order to innovate -- but then there's a lot of old-school experts let go because they don't share the common vision." ABAP is not top of mind when it comes to innovation, he added.

HANA may no longer be a competitive differentiator One of the reasons why SAP laid off so many of its HANA development staff is that providing a database is no longer a strategic differentiator, according to Joshua Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting. At one point, HANA was a strategic differentiator because switching from a classic database to an in-memory database was a novel idea. However, the availability of services from AWS, Google and Azure has rendered databases a commodity, he said. "This is the story of enterprise software: Yesterday's innovation is tomorrow's commodity, and tomorrow's innovation is something you put on stage in front of prospects," Greenbaum said, acknowledging that this is what SAP is doing. HANA and ABAP are no longer strategic, and many consider these to be anchors holding them back, he added.