Who will benefit most of SAP HCI?

[Former Member]

There is a lot of documentation on Hana Cloud Integration, what it is and what it can do and how it looks like. There is not much said for which types of company it’s suitable for. Is it more suitable for the large or small and midsize companies or both? Let’s start with looking at the key benefits from SAP and see if there is an answer for which type of company it’s suitable for.

Standard SAP Content

SAP provides a lot of standard content which can be used in order to connect SAP ERP, HCM, SRM, APO and SAP Financial services with On Premise or On Demand solutions. The benefits of using standards are that they are working as expected and are of good quality. This will leverage the implementation costs and effort of devising a ‘new standard’. It’s more likely that a large enterprise has the need to integrate with different SAP products than a small or midsize enterprise. The small and midsize are often using one (or a few) SAP products.

SAP takes control of maintenance

The Hana Cloud Integration software runs in the datacentres of SAP. SAP is in control of the maintenance and monitoring of the system in terms of scalability. There is no one who needs to check if the system reaches the 80% CPU usage or space limits for example. In addition upgrades will be done by SAP too. When starting using SAP Hana Cloud Integration there is a minimal up-front investment needed, no costs for hardware and software installation are needed. In general there is no need to have in-depth technical knowledge on SAP HCI as it can be treated as a black box. This is interesting for both small and midsize enterprises and large enterprises as there is no need to invest into technical monitoring and doing upgrades.

Strategic platform

SAP states that SAP Hana Cloud Integration will be the strategic platform for On Demand to On Demand and On Premise to On Demand integration for all SAP customers. In addition, with the previously said, SAP Hana Cloud Integration will become a more open platform and therefore customers, ecosystem and community can extend and create new content. The result will be further simplification of processes and more innovation. This is more in line for large enterprises. Simplification and innovation will help large enterprises to be more cost effective.

Answer

Based on the key benefits from SAP which are mentioned above my answer would be that SAP Hana Cloud Integration is suitable for both types of enterprises. The type of enterprise which will have the most advantage of SAP Hana Cloud Integration are the large enterprises. The main reasons is that SAP Hana Cloud Integration is part of a bigger picture. At this moment it’s optimized to integrate SAP applications (On Demand and On Premise) with the help of standard content. Think about SAP Business By Design towards On Premise ERP system. Also the fact that it is SAP’s a strategic platform,  more and more content will be created to simplify processes. Simplification of processes has the most cost effect on large enterprises, because they usually have more employees who are doing the same work. On top of that the outsourcing of maintenance is a bonus.

What do you think?

I would love to know what the members of the SCN community think about this topic. Please feel free to comment and share your insights?