SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP NetWeaver Cloud, “NEO”, … Confused?
With the recent announcement of the SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud, a number of questions have been circulating about how this offering relates to SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Platform, “NEO” etc.. Confused? So let me try to put things straight, it’s actually pretty simple:
What is SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?
The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offering is a comprehensive cloud infrastructure combined with managed services to allow customers to run their SAP HANA applications, including SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA, in a managed virtual private cloud environment. We prefer to refer to this as an Enterprise Cloud.
What is the SAP HANA Cloud Platform?
It is (and remains to be) SAP’s only public Developer Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS) offering that allows SAP partners, SAP customers and SAP development itself to build, deploy and operate applications in an open and standards-based Cloud environment. Building these applications is made easy by our offering of a number of shared application services and in particular the power of SAP HANA in a service-based manner. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform is hence tailored towards the huge SAP developer community: It provides both Java and Java VM-based language environments like Java itself, (j)Ruby, Scala, Python, Clojure or Groovy as well as HANA native development capabilities like e.g. SQLScript or River Definition Language.
SAP operates this infrastructure, partners and customers can focus on their applications without having to worry about the operations of the underlying technology stack.
While in general allowing to build a wide variety of application types on top, the platform is particularly optimized for two major use cases:
- Serving as an open extension platform for
- SAP Business Suite solutions running on-premise in a customer landscape,
- SuccessFactors solutions running in the Cloud as a Software-As-A-Service offering and of course, since the recent announcement,
- SAP Business Suite solutions powered by HANA running in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
- Building completely new, powerful and high-performance applications on SAP HANA
Examples are “edge” applications extending core functionality in the SuccessFactors Employee Central offering, or extending the reach of classical SAP Business Suite applications like Human Capital Management (HCM) employee self-services with a consumer-grade user experience via mobile devices using HTML5 (e.g. via SAP UI5) or native mobile device experiences.
SAP NetWeaver Cloud Platform is the retired name for a subset of HANA Cloud Platform, which has meanwhile smoothly evolved into something even bigger. It provides the SAP HANA Cloud Platform with its core operations framework, the core services like Identity Management, Single Sign On, Cloud/On-Premise Connectivity, Persistency, Metering and Monitoring, integration into the SAP Store for subscription and billing purposes, etc..
“NEO” has been the SAP internal project name for SAP NetWeaver Cloud platform before it was originally released last year and — as such nicknames tend to do — has been more sticky with people than the marketing department has been hoping for 
How do HANA Enterprise Cloud and HANA Cloud Platform fit together?
As outlined above, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is focusing on providing SAP solutions powered by HANA as managed services in an enterprise-grade, virtual private cloud environment. SAP HANA Cloud Platform can be used to extend these solutions via our public cloud Platform-As-A-Service offering, as one can already do with SAP solutions “classically” operated on-premise or SuccessFactors solutions offered in a cloud environment itself.
Both SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud Platform are running collocated in the same certified SAP Data Center sites and hence allow to be efficiently combined and put to action for dedicated scenarios. In a way, SAP HANA Cloud Platform is available with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, or it is contained in it, but somehow these statements appear to be a bit academic to me. What is really important is that these two offerings fit and work together: One does not replace the other, but each of them solves a specific problem of our customer and partner ecosystem. They compliment each other: All capabilities offered by SAP HANA Cloud Platform can be put to work with solutions provided by SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
Hope that helps to clarify a bit.
Hi Bjoern.
Does it clarify it? Yes. 🙂
Does it make sense outside of this post - not really. 🙁
Part of the problem is the recent change of name that SAP NetWeaver Cloud went through to be renamed as "part of SAP HANA Cloud". http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-39315
Most of us ignored the "part of" bit - indeed changing the hashtag from #sapnwcloud to #saphanacloud made it seem that #saphanacloud was equivalent to #sapnwcloud.
And when I say "most of us" - it seems many in SAP understood this too.
Check out the definition at developer.sap.com
and on the cloud partner area:
https://www.sapcloudappspartnercenter.com/
The second part of the problem is that it appears that the open JVM based PaaS is only part of SAP HANA Cloud Platform. - as you say yourself
(my emphasis 😉 )
As Aiaz tweeted:
"HANA Cloud Platform 2 offer Native (XS), Integrated (River/RDL based), and Open (Neo-Java/JVM based) dev experiences."
I would suggest a strong push to remove references to "SAP HANA Cloud" and replace with "part of SAP HANA Cloud Platform" either that or give the JVM based PaaS part of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform a name that we can use to distinguish it.
Or should we refer to it as SAP HANA Cloud Platform (Open). #saphcpo ???
Perhaps you could include "SAP HANA Cloud" in your list of names above to explain how they fit together, and then I might understand! 😉
Thanks for at least getting me partway there (by going back, re-reading and realising that SAP NetWeaver Cloud never got renamed, it just got merged and lost its individual identity.)
Cheers,
Chris
Hi Chris,
thanks for the feedback. I agree that we have managed to create quite some confusion in regards of names and what which name actually represents.
The facts are: SAP HANA Cloud Platform is the grander vision of where we want to go with our public Platform-as-a-Service offering. It started off with SAP NetWeaver Cloud Platform (== NEO) and gets extended beyond the JVM-based environment into both "native HANA" development (work in progress) and we plan other open language runtimes (ex. node.js) as well.
In that sense, yes, NEO got into something bigger (but the bigger started off with NEO) and yes, the new name is SAP HANA Cloud Platform. IMHO it does not really make sense to distinguish a subset of the platform from the bigger platform. You can distinguish the services we have in there. I think that's enough. And those services, just to make the point, were actually renamed: SAP NetWeaver Cloud Integration became SAP HANA Cloud Integration when we released it... And SAP NetWeaver Cloud Portal became SAP HANA Cloud Portal.
So both is true: NEO "merged" into a bigger vision and it got renamed.
As Aiaz and I had written: It's open and standards based and supports on top (in the future) "native" HANA dev (it's not there yet, but we're working on it), where "native" is mainly defined as "you work with SAP HANA Studio and get access to the coding artifacts that HANA supports 'out of the box'".
Hope that helped to address a few of your remarks.
Björn
Thanks Björn,
Yes that does help. Although I do disagree about not needing a name for the JVM based bit of SAP HCP - writing "I'm having an issue deploying to HCP" will eventually mean so many different things that it will again get confusing. And it's hard to champion development on "The JVM bit of the HCP". Again I can't see that being particularly easy to reference, and as the tweet stream last night proved, it can easily get very confusing.
But thanks for doing the clarification - I'm sure it will help.
And whilst you're working on the native HANA bits of HCP, please think about how awesome it would be to be able to use some of that HANA Studio functionality underneath the apps we develop on "The JVM bit of HCP" 😉
Cheers,
Chris
Yes, of course, the SAP HANA Studio support for HANA in SAP HANA Cloud Platform will of course allow to create/modify HANA artifacts that can be consumed in the "JVM bit of HCP" as well 😉
In regards of names: I think Marketing came up with "SAP HANA Cloud Platform runtime for Java" to refer to the "JVM bit of HCP". And it's not a separate product name, but descriptive 😉 Well, perhaps you stick with NEO for the time being ;-)...
Björn
Hi Bjorn,
Very good article indeed, but I'm missing a piece: where is SAP positioning the "other PaaS" (SAP ByDesign Studio, or ByDesign SDK) that we are using to develop Scalable solutions on SAP Cloud apps such as SAP Business ByDesign or SAP Cloud for Sales??
I'm confused where to place that in the picture... as well as I'm confused about SAP Store versus SAP Hana Marketplace...
Best Regards,
Jose
myCloudDoor
Hi Jose,
the SAP Business ByDesign Partner Development Kit is not a general Platform-As-A-Service offering in the broader sense. It is a specific extension kit to extend the SAP Business ByDesign Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.
Technically, all these solutions run in the SAP Cloud, SAP's cloud infrastructure and share a vast part of the operations infrastructure and services.
SAP HANA Marketplace is "just" another frontend to the SAP Store with "things all HANA". As soon as you try to subscribe or purchase an offering, you'll see that you'll get to the SAP Store.
Björn
Hi Bjoern,
it answers some questions but to me there are still some that are open and I hope that you do not mind going very straight to the point.
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud:
This would mean to me that you have a very large SAP HANA Installation (the famous PetaScale) which you partition for your customers so that all can have their chunk.
- I believe this is not really how it does work since it is more likely that the Petascale System is chunked up for the customers.
However it would be highly interesting for the Customers and Partners to have such a solution. I can picture Customers who have a 16TB+ SAP HANA System which they can partition just like they do with their Mainframes or Unix Systems. This would allow also to tackle the point which have been raised that currently the HW is too expensive. It would be interesting to know if you could shed some more light on this type of funcionality.
Good discussion - thanks!
Thanks for giving an insight into the differences. Yes, I agree that the names have caused lot of confusion.
Cheers
Murali
hi Bjorn,
I do no know if I understand correctly. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is private cloud and SAP HANA Platform Cloud is public cloud. Is it right ?
Jason
Hi Jason,
Here we leave secure ground of definition. In other words: It depends. Yes, HANA Enterprise Cloud definitely is private Cloud if we define this as a Cloud based hosting system. In general private cloud means a cloud ran in a private network. This is definitely not the case here. On the other hand you can define an IP range that is hosted as part of your private network (which makes access more secure). I'm not aware that we are supporting this.
HANA Platform Cloud is a public cloud as long as we define this to be a publicly accessible Cloud environment. But this very much depends on how you write the programs there.
So, the terms public and private cloud are not really the right terms for describing our offerings
Regards,
Benny
Hi Bjorn
Thanks. Does help. So can we summarize saying
SAP HANA Cloud platform is based on PaaS and more targeted for business applications development.
while SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is a typical SaaS where the business suite systems of companies based on HANA are hosted + all other administrative stuff like upgrades/performance/backup/DR/HA are taken care by SAP?
Where does SAP HANA One fit into the picture?
Thanks and Br
Chandrakanth
Hi Chandrakanth,
Chandrakanth Angannagari wrote:
[quote]
Hi Bjorn
Thanks. Does help. So can we summarize saying
SAP HANA Cloud platform is based on PaaS and more targeted for business applications development.
[/quote]
yes.
[quote]
while SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is a typical SaaS where the business suite systems of companies based on HANA are hosted + all other administrative stuff like upgrades/performance/backup/DR/HA are taken care by SAP?
[/quote]
yes.
[quote]
Where does SAP HANA One fit into the picture?
[/quote]
HANA One is a HANA database system for development purposes hosted at Amazon AWS. Not intended for productive environments and with limited memory. Think it as a learning system.
Regards,
Benny
You may also refer - https://blogs.sap.com/2020/09/24/sap-hana-enterprise-cloud-vs-sap-cloud-platform-vs-sap-hana-cloud/