Sap Hana Cloud Offerings: Understanding Your Options: E-Guide [PDF]

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SAP HANA CLOUD OFFERINGS: UNDERSTANDING YOUR OPTIONS SearchSAP

SAP HANA CLOUD OFFERINGS: UNDERSTANDING YOUR OPTIONS

Home Choosing a HANA cloud provider requires some serious digging SAP HANA Cloud Platform emerging as go-to PaaS

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SAP HANA cloud provider requires a thorough understanding of how it interacts with your existing SAP landscape. Learn the intricacies of this selection process, and about the disruption of in-memory PaaS.

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SAP HANA CLOUD OFFERINGS: UNDERSTANDING YOUR OPTIONS

CHOOSING A HANA CLOUD PROVIDER REQUIRES SOME SERIOUS DIGGING Home Choosing a HANA cloud provider requires some serious digging SAP HANA Cloud Platform emerging as go-to PaaS

Chris Maxcer When it comes time to choose a HANA cloud provider, it’s important to make sure 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 applications, such as SAP S/4HANA Finance (formerly known as Simple Finance) and the new flagship ERP suite, SAP S/4HANA. Things start to look more complicated when it comes to deployment choices. An enterprise can run S/4HANA in the cloud, on-premises in its own datacenter 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 offering is a platform as a service that lets organizations extend or customize SAP applications as well

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as build new applications. It is also used by SAP business partners who deliver industry-specific add-on software. 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 providers. “The vast majority of SAP HANA implementations today is in support of SAP software, like SAP BW [Business Warehouse], SAP Business Suite, and obviously S4/HANA,” said Adam Ronthal, research director of information management at Gartner. “There is minimal use of HANA as a general-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, SAP is not always the best option, Ronthal said. Gartner recommends that potential HANA cloud users look at the complete set of services available from cloud providers because users who employ a broader range of services tend to gain more value. PA G E 4 O F 1 4

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“We recommend they approach the cloud selection process not just to meet their immediate needs but to meet their potential future needs as well,” he added. Home Choosing a HANA cloud provider requires some serious digging SAP HANA Cloud Platform emerging as go-to PaaS

HANA CLOUD DETAILS ARE HARD TO FIND

While HANA has been around for nearly five years, details on HANA cloud offerings are surprisingly hard to find. “The amount of information that SAP is sharing around their cloud offerings 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 proposing the solution that will work best for them.” And this shift, it turns out, 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, readyto-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. PA G E 5 O F 1 4

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Consequently, Herbert recommends that before organizations choose a HANA cloud provider, they should agree on what’s important to their organization. “Everyone needs to understand there is this continuum between speed and elasticity -- with a cloud solution -- versus control,” she said. MORE REASONS TO CHOOSE A SINGLE HANA CLOUD PROVIDER

While Gartner recommends that HANA cloud customers look closely at providers who can be there for future needs, not just single applications, Forrester recommends a similar consideration but for a slightly different 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 stronger. 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,” she explained.

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LOOK FOR CERTIFICATIONS

Home Choosing a HANA cloud provider requires some serious digging SAP HANA Cloud Platform emerging as go-to PaaS

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 providers? It’s not exactly easy, but here are a few resources and tips. Third-party providers can deliver HANA as a managed service, as a hosted service, as 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 certified 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. It covers nearly 300 partners and lets users filter partners by services such as “hosting,” “SAP HANA,” “infrastructure,” or “cloud,” in addition to filtering by country. PA G E 7 O F 1 4

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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 certifications 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 smallbusiness 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 new partner options will appear on SAP’s new Find Certified IaaS Platforms page, but at the time of this writing, the site wasn’t yet populated with options.

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SAP HANA CLOUD PLATFORM EMERGING AS GO-TO PAAS Chris Maxcer Home Choosing a HANA cloud provider requires some serious digging SAP HANA Cloud Platform emerging as go-to PaaS

The SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP), an in-memory platform as a service (PaaS), represents the future of customizations for SAP users, as well as extensions to SAP software. If an SAP user wants to write applications that tie into SAP software, whether on-premises or in the cloud, SAP is encouraging them to do it with HCP. Furthermore, SAP wants third-party ISVs and integrators to take their industry-focused expertise and deliver it through apps and extensions built upon HCP, which can then be sold to SAP’s 250,000 customers through the SAP store, creating, in effect, an enterprise-grade “app store.” The vision is ambitious but critical to SAP’s cloud strategies. “If you’re an SAP customer, you’re getting a lot of pressure to go to the cloud,” said Forrester Research Inc. analyst John Wargo. “Everything for SAP is going in cloud, all the development tools, the suite and everything else, so it’s not going to be long before -- if you want to do anything innovative or new with SAP -- it’s going to be in the cloud first.” PA G E 9 O F 1 4

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Of course, using the cloud is not without benefits, Wargo noted. For example, you could buy a prebuilt application and configure and deploy it from the cloud instead of having to make programmatic changes. If you can remove complexity by using HCP, he said, “that’s when this becomes really powerful.” WHY CHOOSE HCP?

SAP HANA Cloud Platform is made up of several different services that users can tap into, but the foundation includes three core options: SAP HANA App Services, SAP HANA DB Services and SAP HANA Infrastructure Services. App Services is for the creation of applications and includes support for integration, analytics, mobile, portals and collaboration. It builds on the capabilities of SAP HANA DB Services, which provides an SAP HANA system with a monthly license and infrastructure subscription in configurations up to 1TB. SAP HANA Infrastructure Services lets customers quickly deploy their existing HANA licenses in the cloud for use with HCP. HCP has the components to compete with PaaS options from Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, Google and others, but is HCP likely to get the nod from non-SAP focused developers?

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“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 Inc. estimates that only 1,200 to 1,500 customers are using HCP today. “That’s not a huge number,” said Massimo Pezzini, a Gartner fellow and research vice president, but he expects that SAP’s recently increased marketing and messaging around HCP -- along with the release and adoption of S/4HANA -- will spark additional HCP activity. Pezzini said that the reaction of HCP customers he’s spoken with is positive. “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 customers 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 integrating that with SAP on-premises -- and that is modeling the classic uses,” he said. “In some cases, they are experimenting, PA G E 1 1 O F 1 4

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but others are very serious business-critical applications deployed on a global basis leveraging HCP.” Interestingly, Pezzini said that some enterprise clients, including SAP clients, are using more than one PaaS. “For example, I was talking to a packaged manufacturing company that is using three platforms as a service -- using SAP for SAP-centric applications, Salesforce.com for doing similar things against Salesforce.com, and finally using Amazon,” Pezzini said. “I believe this is going to be such a situation for many out there. Very few organizations will be able to standardize on a single platform as a service.” THE SAP STORE AND RISE OF THIRD-PARTY APPS

Key to SAP’s HCP effort is encouraging and assisting third-party developers to create extensions, plug-ins and apps that use data from SAP systems. In one example, a small startup called EnterpriseJungle has tapped into HCP to deliver its app directly embedded within SuccessFactors. EnterpriseJungle is a knowledge management 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, PA G E 1 2 O F 1 4

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EnterpriseJungle’s “Who can help me?” tool allows a visual search of the workforce with up to 150 search filters. Interestingly, EnterpriseJungle didn’t have to be created with HCP -- other PaaS options could have worked. So why did EnterpriseJungle choose HCP? “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 previously available,” said James Sinclair, co-founder of EnterpriseJungle. As a very small startup, EnterpriseJungle wanted an ecosystem that could bring access to a loyal customer base, in addition to an integrated platform that could change how software is purchased by enterprises. Sinclair said that HCP also lets his company rapidly create custom prototypes that SAP-using clients can touch and feel. “Now we’re getting traction on the ability to deliver design-led solutions, very quickly, without any limitations,” Sinclair said. “The integration to mobile and into existing infrastructure and technologies is just fantastic.” Because SAP has delivered the components for integration and security, Sinclair said, the amount of effort that his team -- and the customer -- has to put into compliance and review is greatly reduced. “Absolutely from a trust perspective, the sales cycle and the implementation are expedited,” he said. PA G E 1 3 O F 1 4

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