A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "SAP Published An A2A Agent. Here Is How Oracle And Salesforce Compare.," Kin Lane, November 11, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/11/11/sap-published-an-a2a-agent-here-is-how-oracle-and-salesforce-compare/
Priya runs developer relations for a mid-size software company, and she read the post on a Wednesday morning with her coffee going cold. She had opened it expecting a vendor scorecard. The 934 conformant cards out of 1,279 providers made her feel a little behind. Her own company was in neither number.
The SAP section was the part she slowed down on. The card describes a learning agent for developer tutorials, with its own endpoint and five skills, and the post says it runs protocol version 0.3.0. What stuck with her was the contrast with the cards that come from documentation platforms, where the usual skill is a generic line like use when building integrations with the product. Her own docs site could produce a card exactly like that in an afternoon. She noticed that she wanted to, because it would let her report a checkbox as done. The post called that a fine discovery step and then said plainly that it is not an agent you can hand work to. That stung, because it was accurate.
She liked that SAP's progress skill admits the caller must forward the end user's identity token. She also liked the last skill, which exists so that "a central agent can quote" exact tutorial steps. Somebody had written for a reader that was not a person. Priya tried to picture her own team doing that and could not say who would own it.
Then she pushed back, mostly to herself. The post says Oracle and Salesforce have no card, but the checks only covered four hosts each, and the Salesforce paragraph admits that says nothing about what the company does inside its products. Reading the comparison as a ranking felt unfair to her. A missing card is a missing card, not a missing strategy. She also bristled at the claim that any enterprise company could copy the pattern in a few weeks. Her company had a security review that took longer than that to schedule. The post gave no hint of how long the authentication piece would take, and the identity-token skill made her suspect that was the hard part.
She did concede the point underneath. The post says that if a developer portal already has search, tutorials and an llms.txt, it is "most of the way there". Hers had all three. What it lacked was anyone who had decided what an outside agent should be allowed to ask.
She did not start a project. She did not open a ticket or ping her director. She opened a blank note and wrote down the three things her docs search already answers well, in plain sentences, each with what a caller would need to send and what would come back. Under the last one she wrote that it would need a user's identity and that she did not yet know how.
Then she typed her developer host into a browser with the well-known path on the end, just to see what came back. It returned a not-found page. She copied that into the note, closed the post, and went to her first meeting.