Re-Cap SAP HANA Cloud Integration Info Days

Another great event, the SAP HANA Cloud Integration Info Days at SAP A.G. This event was all about sharing, learning and meeting fellow professionals. It was an open minded day were we had time for discussions and to get hands-on experience on SAP HANA Cloud Integration.

Benefits

SAP made the statement that it wants to hear more from their partners. That’s why several partners (including myself and Igor Mitrovic) were asked to tell what we think of SAP HANA Cloud Integration. What we think, are key benefits and the missing capabilities of SAP HANA Cloud Integration. Mainly everybody agrees on the benefits:

1. Reduced Costs-of-Ownership
2. Centralized technical monitoring
3. Pre-packaged integration content

Missing capabilities

The main missing capabilities:

1. Connectivity options (additional adapters)
2. Monitoring needs improvement (e.g. pick up payload, adapter & performance monitoring)

One of the missing capabilities we did not all fully agree upon at first was the B2B/EDI Add-On. SAP HCI definitely needs a B2B/EDI Add-On, to be a full blown Middleware Tool. The B2B/EDI Add-On needs to cover at least: ANSI X.12, EDIFACT, TRADACOM and Plain text.  Without this functionality SAP HANA Cloud Integration will not take the next step forward. It will be a middleware tool to connect existing SAP On demand/On premise applications and that’s it.

License/subscription model

Another great discussion on this topic, customer can choose out of 2 different subscription models:

1. Standard Edition
   1. 10 Connections
   2. 100 GB Bandwidth
2. Professional Edition
   1. 25 connections
   2. 1 TB Bandwidth
   3. Additional connections possible

From my perspective this is a hybrid solution of a cloud based subscription model. When I want to use a cloud application, I really want to pay per usage. In this case I would like to pay per connection and perhaps in combination with bandwidth. For example when I already have 10 connections and want to add 1 new connection then I need to go to the professional edition. This is overkill for just one connection.

SAP is also busy with exploring a new variant “HCI for Partners”. This will be a low-price subscription especially for partners. This HCI instance cannot be used in a productive environment and is intended to be used for demo’s, developing integration content or developing new adapters.

What do you think?

Is a B2B/EDI Add-on a must have or a nice to have in SAP HCI? Is the substription model fine? Please share your thoughts.