SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud – important step to… where?
During SAP Global Press Conference web-cast (Tuesday, May 7th) SAP revealed their vision for SAP cloud-based offering. This announcement was followed by a series of blogs and SAP Sapphire sessions/keynotes/discussions where SAP did a really good job on explaining how individual parts will fit together and what are the differences between individual offerings.
More on this subject can be found in the following blogs:
Sunshine on a Cloudy Day (by Vishal Sikka)
http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2013/05/07/sunshine-on-a-cloudy-day
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Platform, NEO, … (by Björn Goerke)
Evolution of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform (by Aiaz Kazi)
http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2013/05/10/evolution-of-the-sap-hana-cloud-platform
Sapphire Now 2013 report card (by Jon Reed)
http://diginomica.com/2013/05/17/sapphire-now-report-card
I personally believe that it would be very useful to describe SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud also from technical side (some architectural diagram on how it is built) – but that is not the point of this blog.
While SAP did really well on explaining this particular move I still believe that it is not clear enough (at least to me) where exactly this move is leading to in long-term perspective. There is space for different interpretations of where SAP is going and how the vision of SAP future can look like.
Before I start I would like to point out that all of this is pure speculation based on lack of information on this subject. I hoped that this would become clearer during SAP Sapphire but I did not find anyone able to provide me with a satisfying answer to this question.
I would also like to highlight that content of this blog describes my personal opinion and is not representing in any way the position of my employer.
Speculation #1: SAP as the exclusive cloud provider for SAP HANA technology
First interpretation of this move (and the most logical) is that SAP is aggressively entering the hosting business with the goal to take over (ideally) all the new SAP HANA based installations as part of their SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offering.
Of course there will be customers that will prefer to stay on the premise and customers preferring other hosting partners and these will continue to be supported by SAP, but all customers will be pushed by SAP to take advantage of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
What does it mean? This might have considerable impact on the SAP ecosystem. From the perspective of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud many SAP partners will not be partners anymore and will rather become suppliers – of hardware, of software (for backups or monitoring), and possibly also of services (in case that SAP will decide to outsource part of managed services). In any way SAP would step between the customer and the partner, taking over the control over the engagement and closing the options for customers.
In other words – there will not be any need for basis teams or infrastructure architects (except those working directly for SAP). This can be seen as a serious blow not only to partners themselves, but also to the whole SAP ecosystem, because some roles will become redundant (from the perspective of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud).
Note: Of course nothing will change in the on-premise world, but this world will become smaller and smaller over time.
What about non-HANA based applications? SAP announced that the purpose of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is to host SAP HANA based applications. But what about the rest of the customer environment? Possibly, this is where partner cloud offerings (that are usually more generic and are able to host various technologies) come into play.
During SAP TechEd 2012 in Last Vegas SAP was predicting the time of „interconnected clouds“. Is this vision describing SAP future?
SAP announced that all SAP applications will be able to run on SAP HANA. Therefore this also means that all SAP applications will be supported in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
Does this mean that in the future SAP will expect that all SAP software will be hosted in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and all non-SAP software in partner clouds?
Of course we are speaking about SAP vision for the future – real result can be completely different as it depends on what the customers will demand.
Speculation #2: SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud as a „prototype“ for other cloud partners (or maybe also SAP customers)
Second interpretation can be seen as opposing extreme to the previous example.
SAP published SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud FAQ:
http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC-3554
In this FAQ you can find the following question and a corresponding answer:
Q: Is SAP getting back into the hosting business? A few years back SAP said that hosting was a partner’s domain and many invested in that business.
A: SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is not a generic hosting offering, but allows enterprise customers an option to accelerate their SAP HANA, SAP Business Suite, and SAP NetWeaver BW powered by HANA deployments; certified partners are encouraged to provide their own SAP HANA based offerings to customers.
Also you might notice in various places that one of the important incentives for SAP behind offering SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud was their goal to enable faster SAP HANA adoption and to remove all roadblocks for potential customers (particularly in the area of HW procurement – you do not need to buy any HW in case of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud).
Does this mean that SAP is not seeing SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud as product that they will try to aggressively push forward, but rather as a tool that will help them to accelerate adoption of SAP HANA technology?
If so, it would be logical to expect that SAP will challenge their hosting partners and cloud providers to build their own SAP HANA Enterprise Clouds according to SAP specifications, because this would increase adoption of SAP HANA much more. In this case I would expect SAP to release reference architecture for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, their Cloud Frame technology and best practices on how to operate such environment.
Next question can be if big customers would be allowed to raise their own SAP HANA Enterprise Clouds in their own data centers. There are customers that are still having their own data centers and these customers could benefit from this possibility.
What does it mean? This scenario would have totally different impact on hosting partners as this would only change the way how they will provide their hosting services. Partners could continue to provide on-premise hosting and in parallel to that they can complement existing generic cloud offerings with dedicated co-located SAP HANA cloud offering.
Other partners (hardware, software or even services) would also have better positions, because they would be able to make alliances with individual cloud providers. The whole SAP ecosystem would be heavily transformed, but would survive this change.
And customers that prefer to run their SAP business in their own data centers could still benefit from SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud without giving up their independence.
Summary
To me it is not clear where SAP is heading, and I believe that anything between these two extreme options is possible. I totally agree that SAP made very important step, but in which direction?
I think that SAP should better formulate their long term vision as this will (in either way) seriously impact the whole SAP ecosystem – all SAP partners, all SAP customers and all practitioners.
I would welcome all constructive critics or explanations – it might be my mistake of not understanding SAP strategy (and I fully admit that this is possible) but I consider this unclear situation as so important, that I cannot afford to ignore it.
Hi,
If you are looking for additional details on the technical architecture of the HEC as well as information about the HEC partner ecosystem, you might want to take a look at my long blog on the subject.
D.
Richard,
thanks for the link to your blog which is very good indeed. Still there are quite a few questions + concerns that I would still have. I will write a post about it but I think that this subject deserves a lot more converstations.
Hello Richard,
first let me tell that you did extraordinary job by putting all this together - big respect for this....
...however somehow I would expect SAP to deliver this message because what you had to do (because of lack of information on this subject) is to collect bits and pieces and various hints from individual blogs and tweets and extend this by huge amount of assumptions that you are stacking on top of it...
...in other words - attempt to make things simple (therefore not precisely accurate) in one of the blogs you used can lead to wrong assumption which could then lead to totally different result...
...you did really well - with your blog (if it is correct in its conclusion) things are more clear (or at least seems to be) - but I think we need SAP to communicate 100% guaranteed assumption-free message how this really works...
To give example of possible misinterpretations:
SAP and partner solutions will be either running on the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud or partner hosted offerings leveraging the cloud platform capabilities of the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud [My Emphasis]
---> this can also mean partners will host non-HANA based part and HANA based part will be inside SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud..
SAP plans to deliver the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud along with its partners in an “open + us” strategy. SAP intends to adapt this open ecosystem strategy with its managed service providers to offer the capabilities of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud from their data centers, as well as from multiple SAP data centers worldwide
---> this can also be interpreted that hosting partners can "resell" hosting in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud..
Regarding SAP HANA Enterprise Partner program - this looks to me that nothing related to hosting is included - it looks more like development oriented and partially service oriented (with focus to migration into the SAP HCE) type of initiative... (but I can be wrong)
And last - in regards to technical architecture - there are some hints and messages around like that HCE does not use virtualization - so I guess SAP did "bare metal automation" on peta-byte farm... Where exactly will BW part run - I do not think it is peta-byte farm itself - so probably second cloud (probably virtualized)... How this fits together... Where exactly NEO is running, etc...
...answer will probably be that this is not my business as this is SAP internal stuff - but my opinion is that such description would make a lot of things very clear for technical people (like me)... all these value based and functionality based descriptions are actually not making things very clear right now...
Bottom line - I believe there are still many possibilities how this is really working and where SAP is going and I think SAP should clarify the solution and its direction to avoid confusion in ecosystem... (my opinion)
Tomas
Hi Tomas. Tnx for your insights.
I want to share some of my thoughts.
The world is going towards cloud. SAP has to find a way to provide a smooth transition path to move from onpremise to ondemand without losing their customers to competition.
By hosting customers enviroments in SAP's own hosting facilities they build a direct relationship with the customers and can provide services to monitor the systems and advice customers on their transition. SAP can e.g. monitor the financial processes running on the customers SAP ECC system on SAP HANA Enterprise cloud and advice customers when (and how) they can migrate to the new Financials OnDemand offering. Same count for e.g. CRM (to SalesOnDemand) or SRM (Ariba)
This would be harder to do if partners host the customer systems in their facilities.
So for me the whole SAP HANA Enterprise cloud is also about providing transition paths from traditional Business Suite (client server) model to new cloud based model solutions.
Curious about your thoughts on this.
Hello,
thanks for your opinion... I totally agree that cloud is future - that is why I mentioned that on-premise world will become smaller and smaller over time...
I would like to mention that I never said that SAP is doing good or wrong move - all I was trying to do is to point out that SAP message is not clear enough and can be easily misinterpreted. I would like to understand what SAP is trying to achieve before I would dare to question their direction...
SAP is VERY clear on their position about SAP HANA as technology - they spent HUGE amount of time (including keynotes) on clarifying technical details how this technology works and what is their direction - all of this just to avoid ecosystem misinterpreting their message (and even through this it is happening).
They do not have same clarity on SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. There are almost no technical details and SAP is communicating this offering only in business values and functional diagrams. Also their long term vision is not (in my opinion) clear enough. As result it will probably be misinterpreted and SAP will need to spend time "fixing" the perception of this announcement over the time (possibly during SAP TechEd events).
All I am after in this blog is to point to this problem because I believe that this announcement will have critical impact on SAP ecosystem.
Tomas
P.S.: From you answer it looks you think scenario #1 is correct, right?
Hi Tomas,
Very good blog and issue (and apologies for not commenting earlier, it's been on my to-do list): in other blogs (which you reference) the technical details of SAP HEC and the PaaS within/on top of it are becoming more and more clear, but the same can not be said of the long-term vision regarding HEC.
You compare this to HANA, where the messaging is a lot clearer, but I think that's not entirely fair: HANA (and the messaging around it) has been around a couple of years now, so it's only logical the messaging and positioning of HANA is clearer. Over time, I'm sure the same will happen to HEC.
About the less and less need for basis people and infrastructure architects: that's irrelevant for the discussion about HEC, because the world is moving to the Cloud anyway (HEC or no HEC), so the need for these roles will become less regardless the direction SAP will be taking with HEC. My 2 cents of course 🙂 .
Regarding your central question: it's difficult to assess which direction SAP will be going.
Some thoughts:
Of course I don't have any answers, but it's good to discuss these things. And I understand where you're coming from, being an IBM employee 🙂 . Personally, it won't have so much impact on me, since I work for a small consultancy firm. We (= consultants) have our own challenges with regard to the move to the cloud however, but that's a totally different subject.
Cheers, Fred
Hello Fred,
thanks for comment...
Regarding comparison of SAP HANA and SAP HEC in regards to clarity - I think it is good comparison as SAP can learn from their own experience...
Hasso spent one hour "demystifying" SAP HANA on Sapphire keynote - how many times these messages were communicated? I heard them so many times that it is almost like broken record to me - but still it is being misinterpreted again and again - I can fully understand how frustrated he must feel... And all this is happening to a technology that is communicated in so clear way from the beginning when it first appeared...
With this in mind - what will happen to HEC that is not (in my opinion) communicated in so clear way...? The message will get twisted so much that maybe even SAP would be surprised how their announcement can be interpreted...
Regarding the basis and infrastructure teams - you are right that need for basis guys and infrastructure architects will be decreasing as cloud will be adopted (no matter if HEC or non-HEC) - but some companies (like Amazon) are not offering managed services - so here basis guys will still have their opportunity... but that was not the main message of the blog - I just used that as illustration how this might affect community..
Regarding being IBM employee - I am not that much concerned from perspective of being IBM employee but rather being SAP basis guy with focus on SAP HANA operation... 🙂
But of course this is not the reason for writing this blog - reason is that I tried to find the answer (for myself) and found nobody that would really know - this is when I realized that maybe I am not the only one confused...
Tomas
Hi Fred,
I hope that I am not taking too much advantage of my role as IBM employee as well as SAP Mentor. I would also like to highlight that I am and have been one of the strongest defenders of SAP HANA within IBM for more than 2 years.
Tomas is raising some very good points in his comment to you regarding the demystification of SAP HANA from Hasso during the keynote. Let me just quickly answer to one of them:
- Specific HW is needed -> Hasso said this is not true. Well sorry it is true there is a published PAM on which the HW is stated. This HW has to use the most high end chipset of INTEL which would typically not be used by customer for power consumption and price point. Yes it is an Intel X86 chipset but definately not mainstream!. Further more the specs HW partner need to comply to in order to be certified do not make it necessarily a mainstream product, yet!
The messages around the keynotes were simply not clear and even worse they are confusing. Saying "Disk is Dead" does not help because when we explain the SAP HANA appliance to a customer he is surprised to see that there is disk (There is disk because you need a persistent storage)
Then there is the point that really got me anxious: "HW is too expensive and the Partners are not making efforts". This is simply not true. I can tell you from experience that we are selling boxes most of the time with a very low profit in order to have a case with the customers. Also we need to produce something each time vs software where you simply send a license key...
I get even more anxious when I recall the good old days (until the 2nd week of march 2013) where SAP had 0 % discount on the licenses. This should be considered somebody is looking for somebody to blame!!!
Last but not least the arguments to have a Cloud for SAP HANA are clear what I am just wondering about and I have not seen any clear answer is:
- Why is this not available to Large Customers since they could as well benefit from the synergies of having a large HANA System chunked into smaller systems (just like a Mainframe or a UNIX system) ?
- From what I know from the HANA architecture I would be very curious to understand on how we can bring this value of Cloud to large customer and other cloud providers.
Hello Carsten,
thanks for commenting... I will structure my comment in points...
1.) Specific HW is needed
I think this is matter of interpretation and what matters most is that everyone understands how it is rather then how exactly this is formulated..
Answer: NO (from Hasso) - you do not need HW produced specifically for SAP HANA appliance that is exclusively used there and cannot be used anywhere else (like when you use X-box or buy a TV) - NO - hardware that is used for SAP HANA is compatible with other use cases even for non-HANA environment... truth is that SAP and Intel collaborated together to design the CPU so that SAP can exploit its features and run as fast as possible...
Answer: YES (from Carsten) - SAP HANA is certified to run just on any HW you find at home - as said above SAP HANA did investments with Intel to "run faster" and they want to be able to exploit these investments so they forced fixed configurations to ensure all SAP HANA installations are as fast as possible...
Can technically SAP HANA run on just any HW? Of course - John Appleby installed SAP HANA on Mac Mini:
http://scn.sap.com/community/hana-in-memory/blog/2012/08/27/live-sap-bw-on-hana-on-mac-mini-migration-on-29th-august
Will SAP allow SAP HANA to run on just any HW? Not likely - SAP wants to be sure that SAP HANA story is not spoiled because insufficient HW configuration was used.
Does it make SAP HANA HW more expensive? Yes - machines are using best-of-breed bleeding-edge technologies based on latest developments...
Can this affect adoption? Yes it can - HW is not cheap and until recent changes also SAP HANA licenses were not cheap as well. SAP changed licensing strategy to make SAP HANA cheaper and now they are building SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud to make HW more affordable (as you do not need to pay the price at once at the beginning)
2.) Disk is dead
I think messages like these are those that are later causing misunderstandings... Their purpose is to surprise and shock and to catch attention and to lead the audience to get interested and to start asking "why is this possible" so that SAP can tell them SAP HANA story.
From marketing perspective it is perfect and probably a must... From technical angle it is not helping a lot - I need to always and again and again explain that disk (persistent layer) is required and important...
Second best message is "disk is used just for backing up memory" - this leads to incorrect conclusion that you already have backup and you do not need backup strategy.. also wrong and very dangerous misunderstanding...
I personally consider this as necessary evil for the sake of better marketing...
3.) HW partners to be blamed
I think you made a point and SAP is solving this in their own way - SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud... I personally do not wish to enter this "who's fault it is" discussion...
I personally disagree that partners are not making any efforts. You can see that also partners (including IBM: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/41157.wss) are finding ways how to support SAP HANA in their own clouds - however due to very specific requirements (see point 1.) it is not simple to integrate SAP HANA in productive mode into existing cloud infrastructures so this is not over-night effort...
4.) other questions
For last two points I believe that these should be covered by SAP so I will not comment as I would have to guess the answer...
Tomas
Hi Tomas
If I have to make a prediction, I would say SAP is preparing a huge legion of services which differentiate themselves from what they had service wise in the past in terms of capabilities & capacity.
I would guess right now that they will support (managed services style) anything that will be placed on SAP's HANA cloud. I wouldn't even limit that to administrator type tasks either. Want a scenario on Solution Manager on HANA (parameter recommendation note is already on /notes so it's in the making), SAP will deliver it.
Why isn't SAP more clear about this at the moment? I think because they are not there yet. If they would be they could be more clear. It's in the works.
Impact on partners, yes, I assume there will be impact and the administrator role is subject to change for sure.
Best regards
Tom
Hello Tom,
crisp, direct, honest, crystal clear, not packaged in "diplomatic speech".. thank you for opinion..
Tomas
Hey Tomas,
Nice blog which I think highlights good points. I'll add a few dimensions to the discussion if I may.
SAP has long felt that the SI partners, whilst they made them their riches, also took the bigger part of the implementation spend and didn't put the customer's best interests first.
As a result SAP has been working hard to reduce the cost of implementation. With SAP HANA, you can install it (provided you have correctly configured hardware) with two fingers and ten minutes. With RDS, they dramatically cut implementation cost.
With HEC it is much of the same - SAP looks to provide RDS migration and upgrade services to the cloud that has several important impacts:
1) It gets customers on the latest version of the software
2) It does this at a much lower cost and shorter timeline
3) This protects SAP's maintenance revenue stream as customers on the latest version are much less likely to decommission
4) It provides a platform to upsell more products which deliver more business value, because it's easier to implement them on a customer who has committed to the latest version
Note that all of these things benefit SAP's coffers, but they also have the customer's interest in mind.
HEC, if successful, provides a platform to disrupt the hardware and services partner markets. Hardware and SI partners will, (AND SHOULD!) see this as a threat. But if they see this as a bad thing for their market then they are deluded, because companies like Salesforce and Workday are already eating ERP's lunch, grape by grape.
And this is where I think you missed a point in the blog. Hardware hosting is a low-margin market and if the hardware and SI partners are successful in their response to HEC, they will adapt to offer similar overall packaged services. This is much more about how companies like IBM react to this threat, and reorganize themselves to offer a total managed services offering including hardware, IP, deployment solutions and services and maintenance.
If that happens then SAP will have succeeded with its wider goals.
John
Hello John,
thanks A LOT - you added very good points... I am curious if there will be more responses like yours...
Thanks a lot for stating your opinion...
Tomas
Hi Tomas,
vyborne.
Thank you for such an overview.
We are in very interesting times, living through what will come out the other side.
I've observed in the past in my SAP Basis career, when new things have come along, and SAP's strategy has looked cloudy (no pun intended), once the fog has moved away everything has become clear and made sense.
Between us all, we will continue to observe and figure out how the pieces fit together and slowly but surely the haze will clear and we will see what is on the other side.
Good job,
Andy.
p.s.
there is a lot of discussion these days about 'On Premise' and 'Cloud'.
For the majority of Customers where I have been engaged,
, the Customer's SAP infrastructure has traditionally been considered as 'On-Premise'
. in as much as the Customer's Basis Team have done the installations and maintenance
. but physically, the servers have been rented from for example HP or IBM
. and the servers have been physically located in datacenters belonging to for example HP or IBM
this classification of 'On-Premise' is surely is not far from 'Cloud' ?
the only formal difference I see between the above scenario and today's 'Cloud' is that in today's 'Cloud' world, as you say, the Customer will not have a Basis Team, and all Basis, Administration, Installation, Maintenance, Software & Application LifeCycle Management will be carried out by the Cloud Service Provider as a service.
From what I have seen so far, the 'Cloud' offerings, of fully serviced SAP are not on a scale for the largest SAP Customer's enterprise systems, eg the big SAP Customer's BI's are too big for what the Cloud fully serviced companies are offering as products.
Of course this will change with time.
Hello Andy,
thanks for feedback..
I think you are right - these things are blending together from all sides...
You can have on-premise customers with managed services requested from service delivery organization (so that they do not need to take care of SAP Basis) or you might have SAP hosted in the cloud where customer will explicitly request to take care of SAP Basis themselves...
In the end it is always about what customer wants...
My concern in this blog is mainly about SAP moving to new areas and how this will impact partner relations which will then impact whole SAP ecosystem including all customers.
As John Appleby said above:
I think he is right - partners will most probably see this as threat.
But their response will depend on how serious this threat will be. If the threat level is low (more partnering opportunities then competing opportunities) then we will see healthy competition that will produce better results which will benefit everyone in ecosystem including customers.
But if the threat level will be high (not much partnering anymore - mostly competing) then things might end up in unhealthy way - open conflict that can lead to undesired results. Customers will be bombarded by conflicting statements getting lost in what is true and what is not (misintepretation/desinformation/marketing claims) - not sure who to believe, etc... I personally do not see this situation as very healthy and I think it will benefit nobody.
In this blog I was hoping to catch attention to this problem before it will get out of control...
Tomas
Hi Tomas,
i agree and especially with the your goal of the blog.
yes, this is an issue today with the Hana architectural possibilities, and I don't only mean on-premise, on cloud, but what about, even on premise, let's say the customer wants to implement Hana for ECC, there are currently so many questions and very little guidance, on premise or on cloud, how to deal with the appliances and the system landscape, how many appliances to go for, 1 appliance for non-prod with mcod or one appliance for each non-prod system, vmware etc ?
So much has been written about Hana, so many blogs, but I see very few if any blogs discussing and philosophising the Hana Landscape Architecture questions which will be landing on the desks of all SAP Basis Architects over the coming years.
We can safely assume the majority of Customers during the next 5 years will move to Hana in some respect, and the first question once the Business and CIO have signed off the money, the first question on the Basis Architect's table will be, how are we going to implement it ?
What is the answer, where is the guidance for Basis Architects on strategies for implementing Hana, on premise, off premise, same appliance and platform concept for Prod and QA, then put the rest on VMWare or other possibilities, so many possibilities but very little if anything has been blogged and documented on this area, Hana Implementation Strategies for Basis Architects. It is on my list of tasks, I will start blogging in the area of Hana Implementation and Architecture Strategies for Basis Architects, I cannot blog from experience, but my plan is to blog what I know are the possibilities, philosophise on when to use which and why, and my main goal is to motivate discussion and feedback on this subject so that we can find a concensus.
If you want you can lead that, if you are busy with other things I will do it, we could even do like this, I write the blogs, you proof them and then I publish them in cooperation with you. My motivation is, these questions are going to hit a lot of us soon and we need to start being prepared for them.
And back to your comment,
this isn't just the case for Hana, this is the case today and before.
Look at how many Customers there are with incoherent architecture strategies, because of some reasons or circumstances decisions were taken which after time are shown to not necessarily the most optimal.
Across all areas of SAP we are missing coherent architecture, long term landscape lifecycle strategy guidance.
There is a wealth of human capital experience here on the SCN Community and I think more people with deep long architectural experience should be blogging and discussing architectural strategies for SAP Business suite.
I'll give one example for sake of argument, how many possible different SLD strategies are there, SAP's classic is to tie the SLD to the PI, and in larger landscapes have the SLD on it's own instance(s), but how many Customers follow this and how many poorly architected SLD implementations are there out there which ultimately cost the Companies more in maintenance and support.
Ok, those are my thoughts, you are right to get more attention on this, and I think, we in the Community can start the momentum and blog and discuss the facts and invite the deepest experts (on Hana yourself included here) to also join in and give their insight with the goal that under SAP's auspices we will end up with coherent architectural software landscape lifecycle strategy guidance.
Zdravi,
Andy.
Hello Andy,
actually some work in this direction is already done - have you seen following white paper?
http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC-3211
It was created by cooperation of IBM and SAP.
Tomas
Hi Tomas,
that is a very very very nice document.
I will read it.
From the Basis Architect perspective, pages 61 to 66, section 5.3 go into what I am talking about.
I think there is a need for something even higher level, trying to offer answers and choices to:
What size Enterprise am I ?
In what scenario would I do on-premise and in what scenario would I do cloud ?
What are the implications for future proofing my landscape by choosing either of the above ?
If I do on premise, for my scenario, how will I lay out my Hana solution, how many appliances will I have on hardware with meets the certification specification, how many appliances will I have VMWare and not necessarily meet the RAM/CPU criteria and why ?
In which scenarios can I put multiple Hana db's on one Hana appliance, what are the implications of doing that, maintainance, operation, eg restart means restart the whole box etc, what are the implications for the future - I can move Hana DB's off Hana Appliances with Multiple Hana DB's etc ?
Can I combine Business Suite applications on the same Hana Appliance and if yes, in which scenarios ?
Future proofing the infrastructure etc
I'd like to see a series of blogs opening up the discussions on these higher level Hana Basis Architecture questions.
Because these are going to be the questions landing on the tables of all Basis Architects as their companies move in the direction of Hana.
Again, I must say, that is a fantastic document, and deserves to be highlighted or show cased so that more people are aware of its existence and can get value from it.
Thank you,
Andy.
Hi Tom,
This is really a helpful information especially who are looking for SAP HANA/BI implementation. SAP AG is heading towards cloud based solutions(e.g. success factor integration) since the ERP market is moving towards cloud and will be the leading solution in near future.
Thansk,
Durai
Hello,
I do not think it is so simple - SAP is going (and should be going) into several directions at the same time... mainly SaaS (like SuccessFactors) and PaaS (like SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud)...
Reason is that that are many customers not willing to move to SaaS at this time but they are willing to go into PaaS approach... Just for completeness - SAP will continue to support existing on premise installations (for customers that do not yet feel ready to move into the cloud)...
In long term future SAP will probably want to end up completely on SaaS but that is still too distant... (in my opinion)
Tomas