SAP project Kayak

While debugging I ran few times into the mysterious term "kayak project" in the ABAP code. Occurrences of this term - the kayak; can be visible e.g. in source code of report LSENAF01. This is a screenshot from that report that I also tweeted:

There are couple of function groups/module, classes, many reports etc.. starting with prefix /KYK/* and available in ECC as well. Few examples of function groups:

/KYK/FIN_FI                                Function Modules for Kayak Financials

/KYK/LOG_EXECUTION                 LOG_EXEcution

/KYK/OPS_MM                             Function group for /KYK/OPS_MM

/KYK/OPS_PP                               Function group for PP

From the code that I found it started to be obvious that the kayak is supposed to another full blown ERP within the same environment of ECC?

So I was eager to reveal further what kayak is or what was is. Google just suggests it is an SAP effort to reduce TCO of SAP ERP. Further information I found by some SAP Notes. The kayak seems was really the project happened in year 2006 when SAP came out with product called All-in-One (AiO) or sometimes called SAP Business All-in-One (BAiO) or SME ERP Business All-in-One.

As SAP was historically power house in segment of "big" ERP systems they are (were) also considering on how to enter SME market. In order to enter this market they did several attempts. White paper which I found here suggests that there were following: R/3 running on laptop – project Heidelberg, Ready to Run (in past also used as SAP’s marketing slogan), Ready to Work. And finally there was All-in-One which is ERP application suite for midsize companies for either on-premise deployments or on a hosted basis. It is based on NetWeaver basis platform. The AiO is prepackaged (also for verticals) and even processes are bit simplified (do not confuse this simplification effort with “S – initiative” announced in 20014). Therefore there is so many “kayak specific” ABAP code. 

I already wrote a blog post about AiO some time ago here. It was actually in 2007 I just didn’t know that code name AiO was the Kayak that time :)

If you are running AiO you may observe as per following remarks:

Software Component: KAYAK, version: e.g. 120, Support Package: e.g. SAPK-12005INKAYAK