Pimp my HANA Cloud Platform environment: Imagining new options
Last week, the next phase of the HANA Cloud Platform’s (HCP) evolution was introduced and the use of the HANA Marketplace regarding the offers was promoted. There were a series of options that were provided for customer to customize their environment. Although a good start, I began to consider what additional options might be useful / interesting.
Note: There are a variety of “stores” that are available in the SAP ecosystem to provide cloud-related offers to customers. There are different target audiences for different types of cloud offerings. A LoB customer probably isn’t interested in the amount of RAM that his cloud solution requires – he/she is looking for a particular solution to a business problem. I get the feeling that the new HCP offers in the HANA Marketplace are more directed towards developers, IT individuals rather than LoB customers who are more likely to find interesting offers in the SAP Store. As HCP-based solutions (for example, extensions) emerge, however, that must run in a particular customer tenant, the two worlds must converge into one single entity to provide the best service to SAP customers.
The original options
Here are some ideas for other options:
Please add your own
Infrastructure Services: Database Location
What about the ability to decide where the database instances are located. You may have customers in Europe and Asia. Ideally, you could split your purchased data instances in different regions.
Infrastructure Services: SLAs
You may have different requirements for different customers. What about the ability to determine what SLAs for individual instances are available? Database instances with a higher SLA might cost more.
DB Services, App Services: Packages from ecosystem
As I blogged previously, the ecosystem might be able to provide extensions that a customer might find useful. For example, a particular package of SQL Script functions that are specific to a particular industry (Oil/Gas, Mining, etc) might be pre-ordered and made available in my environment.
All layers: Number of Changes
Currently, there is no indication how changes in the infrastructure / configuration will be charged. What about having the ability to determine the number of changes that are possible during the initial purchase? If you purchase the option of “2 changes/month”, the cost of a third change/month are higher than if you preorder “3 changes / month” during the initial purchase.
App Services: HANA Cloud Portal sites
There are sites that are available for the HANA Cloud Portal (for example, the Team Sites) that might be relevant to the environment being created. What about selecting them during the order process?
App Services: HANA Cloud Integration packages
There are integration packages that are available for HANA Cloud Integration that might be relevant to the environment being created. What about selecting them during the order process?