Dear all,
the last 4 months have been a very interesting and moving time for SAP Cloud Appliance Library. Our team was really touched when we realized how the community picked up the product. Actually, the term “picked up” is not accurate – it was not only picked up, it was really used and experienced - it was consumed. Nothing is comparable with a situation when you worked hard to develop and ship software to make it available to customers and then see that someone is actually using it.
And so it happened with SAP Cloud Appliance Library. In the first week of August we published our first Trial- and Developer Edition. It was the (at that time) brand new SAP NetWeaver 7.40 ABAP Application Server, available with MaxDB or SAP HANA as the database. Since then we got a few other Trial offerings onto SAP Cloud Appliance Library, which is available in version 1.11 already. We now crossed the mark of 2,500 users/customers signed up for a trial already 2 weeks ago. Maybe we are already at 3,000 today?
In the end, we would like to express a really big Thank You to all of you who made that happen. You have chosen the right path to the cloud experience for on-premise SAP solutions. Yes, we achieved a lot but story has to continue. We saw some of you reporting issues with the availability and performance of the cloud. We take this feedback seriously but allow us some time to make the necessary changes available to you. We don’t want to provide a quick and dirty fix – because nobody will benefit from that in the long run. And SAP Cloud Appliance Library is here to stay.
Besides the success of the trial offerings allow me to draw your attention to our paid offering as well because the trials come with various limitations. The paid offering does not have these limitations: You can use it for an unlimited time, and there is no limitation on the number of instances, backups or cloud providers. On top, it also comes with a larger library of SAP solutions, currently 14 solutions ranging between SAP HANA, various SAP rapid-deployment solutions as well as plain systems. We recently added SAP IDES as well as SAP Fiori – because we know that you were waiting for them.
Another highlight is that SAP Cloud Appliance Library is used to support the members of SAPs University Alliance program in educating hundreds of students in cutting-edge technologies such as SAP HANA. The University Competence Center (UCC) at Technical University of Munich adopted SAP CAL to optimize, streamline, and simplify the system provisioning process for their clients, the universities. “The cloud services provided by SAP CAL enable us to provision systems for classroom lectures within hours and also allow mass operations”, said Dr. Holger Wittges, Executive Director, at UCC TU München (Munich). "SAP CAL reduces system provisioning to a simple administrative task, making us more independent from rare expert resources." Dr. Wittges also expects that using cloud services provided by SAP CAL allows customers to get system access on complex SAP landscapes on a pay per use basis if they do not need them 24/7. “This concept is very interesting to save money if flexible payment terms are an option on customer side", he added.
Overall, I’m looking forward for the next months to come and I hope you stay engaged with SAP and SAP Cloud Appliance Library the way you already are.
