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Get Lost in the Cloud With HANASAP is encouraging users to follow HANA into the cloud. But with so many options, customers may need a roadmap of the sky. BY CHRIS MAXCER

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Head Into the Cloud With HANA

The advantages of cloud computing range from easier management to cost savings. That should be especially enticing to SAP users, whose systems are typically complicated and expensive. SAP has a number of cloud initia-tives, and picking one can be tricky. In this handbook, freelancer Chris Maxcer demystifies SAP cloud strategies.

First, Maxcer introduces the SAP cloud ser-vices family, which comprises two groups with similar names but very different approaches and functions. HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) is an application development platform as a ser-vice. HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) provides infrastructure as a service, allowing compa-nies to run SAP-based operations in a hosted environment.

Next, Maxcer takes a deeper look at HCP. SAP is encouraging software vendors and inte-grators to use their industry expertise to build

targeted apps and extensions on HCP, which they can then sell in the SAP Store. The author says only a small percentage of SAP users employ HCP today, but some believe their use will grow as adoption of the S/4HANA ERP product increases and SAP boosts its marketing of HCP.

Finally, Maxcer explores what you need to know before beginning the complex and murky process of choosing a HANA cloud service. SAP designed HEC to make it easier to deploy HANA software as a managed service, but details about HANA cloud options are hard to find. Nevertheless, there are certain things an organization should do when choosing a pro-vider. n

Jim O’DonnellNews Editor SearchSAP

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A Tale of Two HANA Clouds

SAP’s cloud strategy includes two ser-vices with similar names but radically different functions: SAP HANA Cloud Platform and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.

HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) is a platform as a service (PaaS) that lets customers and business partners build and deliver applica-tions that run on top of the platform. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) is an infra-structure as a service (IaaS) product that recre-ates all the servers and software an enterprise uses to run its SAP-based business from an off-site data center.

SAP HCP is a less established PaaS than sev-eral major competitors—such as Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Microsoft Azure, Cloud Foundry, Heroku and Google App Engine—but SAP is working to change that. Accord-ing to John Appleby, global head of SAP HANA for Bluefin Solutions, SAP has maneuvered its “A-Team” leadership into positions to build out

the HCP go-to-market strategy. “It may not be all that visible from the outside yet, but SAP is all in on HCP,” Appleby said.

So, what about usage today? “From a cus-tomer perspective, HCP is in early adopter sta-tus—there are a lot of customers doing a little something and a few who have built interest-ing apps,” Appleby said, noting that in order to ramp up adoption, SAP is working to make HCP easier to buy.

“In addition, S/4HANA extensions will be on HCP with [HANA Cloud Integration] for integration, and as customers start to move to S/4HANA, we will see the usage drive up fast,” he added.

Extension, it turns out, is a key word for HCP. SAP is starting to emphasize that if you’re go- ing to add custom applications or services to SAP software, you should do it with HCP.

“Today, if you’re running Business Suite and you want to customize an application, you go

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into the NetWeaver layer and you write ABAP [Advanced Business Application Programming] code,” said Dan Lahl, SAP vice president of product marketing. “This has been a long-run-ning model, but you know what’s not included in S/4HANA? There is no NetWeaver, so the HANA Cloud Platform is the new extension piece, the integration piece, the develop-new-applications-against-your-data piece.”

As it turns out, there is even more ambition built into SAP’s PaaS. Independent software vendors and system integrators with deep industry-specific expertise can use HCP as a do-it-all platform for add-on applications and extensions. “HCP is like the app store for SAP,” Lahl said. “It’s an exciting new way of thinking [about] how our enterprise applications can get extended.”

CUSTOMERS CAUTIOUS ON CLOUD

“The HANA Enterprise Cloud is really a man-aged service in a private cloud,” explained Lahl. “It’s for traditional customers with a license who want someone they trust to manage it for them.” In fact, Lahl said, most HEC customers

use their existing SAP licenses and then simply pay for the managed services component based on their infrastructure service needs.

The IaaS industry isn’t being embraced by all customers yet. “For true core ERP, customers are still reluctant to go to the cloud,” Appleby said. The reasons include concerns about regu-lation, security, networks and performance, and “the lack, in many cases, of a tangible reduction in total cost of ownership,” Appleby continued.

But Gartner analyst Mike Dorosh sees adop-tion progress. “In the ERP space for net new deployments—those changing platforms or moving beyond something basic—we’re seeing a large number of small-to-midsize customers look to the cloud,” he said.

Ultimately, he explained, the majority of net new deployments are going toward some varia-tion of IaaS. The key driver is that IaaS can help companies eliminate ownership of often under-utilized hardware, which requires skilled staff to constantly maintain.

There is a common route that can transition existing ERP customers to IaaS deployments. “A lot of times, the IaaS starts with test and development environments,” Dorosh explained,

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noting that after developers have a good expe-rience, more cloud-based services often follow for the organization.

SAP is also seeing this kind of trend. For example, Lahl said, a customer might say, “Just give me the database as a service [DBaaS] because I want to build my own application on top of it.” After that, customers naturally start to want to add new types of cloud services.

“While we can describe a very simple PaaS offering, once customers get in and look at how they are going to deploy it, they might ask for an IaaS type of service or a DBaaS,” Lahl said.

CUSTOM SAP CLOUD SERVICES

If you only look at the surface, then the SAP HANA Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud seem straightforward, maybe even rigid. That surface view, though, belies what’s hap-pening in customer engagements and contracts: SAP cloud service pricing is getting more flexible.

“You can’t generalize because there are so

many different possibilities out there—so many different licensing models,” said Dick Hirsch, ServiceNow business analyst at Atos SE. SAP has become much more original and aware of custom pricing models afforded by cloud environments, he added. For example, a contract might note user-based or usage-based pricing while public SAP marketing suggests a different model altogether.

Meanwhile, SAP’s PaaS and IaaS are far from static. HCP is poised to move beyond SAP’s own hosted service—most notably, through SAP’s involvement with Cloud Foundry. “If you look at the close association with Cloud Foundry … this is really interesting because it allows HCP PaaS to be deployable in private clouds or on premises,” Hirsch said.

SAP has been fairly vague on the timing, but Lahl confirmed that the company plans to “containerize” the HANA Cloud Platform to let customers easily move an HCP stack among various IaaS offerings—a move that will give customers a whole new realm of HCP deploy-ment options. n

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Companies Find Allure in HANA Cloud

The SAP HANA Cloud Platform, an in-memory platform as a service, represents the future of customizations for SAP users and the opportunity for extensions to SAP software. SAP users who want to write applications that tie into SAP software, whether on premises or in the cloud, are being encouraged to do it with HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). Furthermore, the German software company wants third-party vendors and integrators to take their industry-focused expertise and deliver it through apps and extensions built on HCP that can then be sold through SAP’s store to its 250,000 cus-tomers, essentially creating an enterprise-grade app store.

The vision is ambitious, but it’s critical to SAP’s cloud strategies. “If you’re an SAP cus-tomer, you’re getting a lot of pressure to go to the cloud,” reported Forrester Research ana-lyst John Wargo. SAP is moving it’s tools to the cloud, Wargo explained, “so it’s not going to be

long before if you want to do anything inno-vative or new with SAP, it’s going to be in the cloud first.”

Using the cloud has its benefits, Wargo noted. For example, you could buy a prebuilt application and configure and deploy it from the cloud instead of having to make program-matic changes. If you can remove complexity by using HCP, he said, “that’s when this becomes really powerful.”

HANA’S APPEAL

SAP HANA Cloud Platform is made up of sev-eral different services that users can tap into, but the foundation includes three core options: App Services, DB Services and Infrastructure Services. App Services is for the creation of applications and includes support for inte-gration, analytics, mobile, portals and col-laboration. It builds on the capabilities of DB

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Services, which provides an SAP HANA sys-tem with a monthly license and infrastructure subscription in configurations up to 1 terabyte. Finally, Infrastructure Services lets customers quickly deploy their existing HANA licenses in the cloud for use with HCP.

HCP has the components to compete with platform as a service (PaaS) options from Ama-zon, Salesforce, Microsoft, Google and oth-ers, but it might not get the nod from non-SAP focused developers. “If you’re not doing this for SAP business applications, then, honestly, there are better, less [expensive] and maybe even better performing options out there,” Wargo said.

HCP is all about SAP’s 250,000 customers, but Gartner estimates that only 1,200 to 1,500 customers are using it today. “That’s not a huge number,” said Massimo Pezzini, a Gartner ana-lyst. But Pezzini expects that SAP’s recently increased marketing and messaging around HCP—along with the release and adoption of S/4HANA—will spark additional activity.

HCP customers that Pezzini has spoken with are reacting positively. “HCP does what it is supposed to do,” he said. “It is reliable,

stable, there are multiple capabilities, and the HANA database itself adds significant value.” The bottom line, he added, is that custom-ers are turning to HCP for the deep out-of-the-box integration between SAP and HANA applications.

Pezzini said he sees customers using HCP primarily for developing new cloud-based applications that interface with SAP ERP on premises. “We have examples of customers building a call center or e-commerce in the cloud using HANA Cloud Platform and inte-grating that with SAP on premises—and that is modeling the classic uses,” he said. “In some cases, they are experimenting, but others are very serious business-critical applications deployed on a global basis leveraging HCP.”

Interestingly, Pezzini said that some enter-prise clients, including SAP clients, are using more than one PaaS. “I was talking to a package

“ [HCP] is reliable, stable [and has] multiple capabilities.”

—MASSIMO PEZZINI, Gartner

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manufacturing company that is using three platforms as a service,” Pezzini said, naming those three as SAP, Salesforce and Amazon. “I believe this is going to be [the situation] for many out there. Very few organizations will be able to standardize on a single platform as a service.”

HANA IN THE JUNGLE

Key to SAP’s HCP effort is encouraging and assisting third-party developers to cre-ate extensions, plug-ins and apps that use data from SAP systems. In one example, a startup called EnterpriseJungle has tapped into HCP to embed and deliver its app within SuccessFactors.

EnterpriseJungle is a knowledge manage-ment engine that delivers personalized content to employees in an enterprise to help them find experts and relevant content from within their own organizations. For example, EnterpriseJun-gle’s “Who can help me?” tool performs a visual search of the workforce with up to 150 filters.

Interestingly, EnterpriseJungle didn’t have to be created with HCP—other PaaS options

could have worked. James Sinclair, co-founder of EnterpriseJungle, explained why his com-pany chose the HANA cloud: “We saw a very clear opportunity for startups to deliver incredible solutions and fight for their place in the SAP enterprise in a way that was never pre-viously available.” As a small startup, Enter-priseJungle wanted an ecosystem that could bring access to a loyal customer base and an integrated platform that could change how software is purchased by businesses.

Sinclair said that HCP also lets his company rapidly create custom prototypes that SAP cli-ents can touch and feel. “Now we’re getting traction on the ability to deliver design-led solutions, very quickly, without any limita-tions,” Sinclair said. “The integration to mobile and into existing infrastructure and technolo-gies is just fantastic.”

Because SAP has delivered the components for integration and security, Sinclair said, the amount of effort that his team—and the cus-tomer—has to put into compliance and review is greatly reduced. “Absolutely from a trust per-spective, the sales cycle and the implementa-tion are expedited,” he noted. n

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Navigate the HANA Cloud Maze

When it comes time to choose a HANA cloud provider, it’s important that key business leaders understand what SAP HANA is—and, more importantly, how HANA permeates the new landscape of SAP application software and databases.

HANA is SAP’s in-memory database, and it’s used by many of the vendor’s newest appli-cations, such as S/4HANA Finance (formerly known as Simple Finance) and the new flag-ship ERP suite, S/4HANA. Things start to look more complicated when it comes to deploy-ment choices. An enterprise can run S/4HANA in the cloud, on premises in its own data center and even in a hybrid scenario.

Meanwhile, there are even more HANA- in-the-cloud options, most notably SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). This HANA cloud product is a platform as a service offering that lets organizations extend or customize SAP applications as well as build new applications.

It is also used by SAP business partners who deliver industry-specific add-on soft- ware.

In contrast, HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) is a private cloud offered as a managed service. It was designed to make it easier to deploy HANA-based SAP software.

All of this gets even more complicated, it turns out, because some of these HANA cloud elements can be delivered by third-party pro-viders. “The vast majority of SAP HANA implementations today [are] in support of SAP software, like SAP [Business Warehouse], SAP Business Suite, and obviously S4/HANA,”

“ The vast majority of SAP HANA implementations today [are] in support of SAP software.”

—ADAM RONTHAL, Gartner

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said Adam Ronthal, a research director at Gartner.

“There is minimal use of HANA as a gen-eral-purpose database management system, which means that most people who are looking for cloud solutions are doing so because they want to run specific SAP software in the cloud, which largely means they are talking to SAP first,” he explained.

But while it may seem natural to talk to SAP first, the German software company is not always the best option, Ronthal said. Gart-ner recommends that potential HANA cloud users look at the complete set of services avail-able from cloud providers because users who employ a broader range of services tend to gain more value. “We recommend they approach the cloud selection process not just to meet their immediate needs but to meet their potential future needs as well,” Ronthal added.

CONFIGURING THE HANA CLOUD

While HANA has been around for nearly five years, details on the HANA cloud are surpris-ingly hard to find. “The amount of information

that SAP is sharing around their cloud offer-ings seems to be shifting from year to year. I mean, if I went to their website two years ago, I could pull up a configurator and it would spit out a price sheet based on what edition I wanted,” Ronthal noted. “Now ... I can’t find anything like that. I think SAP wants to have the conversation with their customers more directly to ensure they are advising and pro-posing the solution that will work best for them.”

This shift speaks directly to the challenge of finding and choosing a HANA cloud provider. “We see this continuing struggle with clients who want the pre-built, ready-to-go cloud, but they can’t really give up their control of uptime or their own upgrades—and these elements don’t go along with a public cloud solution,” said Liz Herbert, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Consequently, Herbert recommends that before organizations choose a HANA cloud provider, they should agree on what’s impor-tant to them. “Everyone needs to understand there is this continuum between speed and elasticity—with a cloud solution—versus

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control,” she said.While Gartner recommends that HANA

cloud customers find providers who can meet their future needs, Forrester recommends a similar consideration but for a slightly differ-ent purpose: savings through simplified vendor

management. “One hidden cost is the overhead of managing multiple vendors,” Herbert said. “If you’re buying from a one-stop shop, your negotiation and buying power might be stron-ger. If you’re a huge SAP customer, you might have more leverage going straight to the source, for example.”

In addition, there is what Forrester calls the multi-vendor tax. “If you have to manage your SAP subscriptions separately from your cloud vendor, there is some [human activity] cost associated with managing both vendors,” Her-bert explained.

LOOK FOR CERTIFICATIONS

For an emerging technology like HANA, it’s important to go with a certified provider, which can limit your options, Ronthal said. “There still doesn’t appear to be a very wide selection of certified HANA partners for the public cloud today.”

So where do you look for certified cloud pro-viders? It’s not exactly easy, but here are a few resources and tips.

Third-party providers can deliver HANA as a managed service, hosted service, managed cloud as a service and through private clouds. SAP recommends that third-party providers use certified hardware to run HANA. So while a third party might not be specifically certi-fied to deliver HANA through the cloud, they should at least be running HANA on certified hardware.

SAP’s own HCP product also offers HANA as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and database as a service. Similarly, users can run HANA as a database on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Certified service providers can be found in SAP’s Outsourcing Operations Partner Guide.

“ If you’re a huge SAP customer, you might have more leverage going straight to the source.” —LIZ HERBERT, Forrester Research

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It covers nearly 300 partners and lets users filter by country and by services such as “hosting,” “SAP HANA,” “infrastructure” or “cloud.”

Using a self-service public cloud for an IaaS-type deployment presents the risk that the provider isn’t using certified hardware. But it may be an SAP Technology Partner with certi-fications for SAP HANA One, a HANA private cloud option that runs on AWS; HANA Bring

Your Own License (BYOL), for transferring HANA licenses between on premises and the cloud; or the small-business ERP offering, SAP Business One.

As of early 2016, the only third-party HANA cloud provider with a BYOL option was AWS, but SAP says it is in the process of signing up more providers in 2016. The partner options appear on SAP’s “Find Certified IaaS Platforms” page. n

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ABOUT THE

AUTHOR

CHRIS MAXCER is a freelance writer. A former content strategy director at Penton Media, he writes frequently about enterprise hardware and software. Email him at chrismaxcer@gmail.com.

Get Lost in the Cloud With HANA is a SearchSAP.com e-publication.

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