#SAPMentor Chris Kernaghan Shares How to Get Started with #SAPHCP

We’re finishing up with SAP TechEd Las Vegas 2015 and one thing has been very clear throughout the Live Studio interviews, keynotes and even the demos featured at last night’s DemoJam – SAP HANA Cloud Platform is “left, right, center and behind everything” at TechEd Las Vegas.

Matthias Steiner said “The time is now, you better catch the train before it leaves the station!” when discussing what’s new in HCP for Developers and Prakash Darji shared why SAP HCP and why now and encouraged developers to try it out, saying “It doesn’t have to be that complex. Just find a use case that works and get started!”

So, what is SAP HANA Cloud Platform?

SAP Mentor, Chris Kernaghan, was kind enough to sit down with me at TechEd Las Vegas and go over the basics.

“HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) is an application platform for developers to build applications, extend on-premise apps – a platform for building applications or extending applications by either writing custom apps or consuming services.”

What can it do?

“Ultimately, HCP is a development platform – in terms of what it can do, it’s really only limited by the imagination of the people using it.”

HCP has been described as a “hidden gem” because it has a number of pre-built features which accelerate application development life-cycles – you’re able to get the skeleton of a platform up and running immediately.

“HCP has pre built functions for internet of things, mobility, mobile device management, UI5 development, analytics, they can take advantage of these – all with access to the HANA database for fast data processing.”

How can someone get started?

There’s a free developer trial account which can be accessed here.

“There is also a massive developer community online with loads of content around how developers can actually start and use HCP and there are videos on YouTube. Because HCP is based on open standards you can leverage many other resources externally. You don’t have to go to SAP to learn the language – you can use many, many external resources.”

There are also community events like Code Jams (a hands-on coding event) where SAP developers who use the platform can share their knowledge. Anyone can host a Code Jam – more information and guidelines here.

Want to see SAP HCP in action? Check out these demos from DemoJam:

The winners of DemoJam created Sensor Monitoring to Improve the Lives of Employees (S.M.I.L.E.) which was built on the IoT platform on HCP.

The team who built the KidEatz app are a great example of how quickly you can build on HCP because none of them had ever used any of this technology and they were able to build the app within 32 hours using HCP and UI5.

Are you ready to start using SAP HANA Cloud Platform? Be sure to blog about it and share your experience with the community!