Technology Blogs by SAP
Learn how to extend and personalize SAP applications. Follow the SAP technology blog for insights into SAP BTP, ABAP, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP HANA, and more.
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
former_member3554
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Live FB Chat with Daniel Szabo (SAP) and Brian Fanzo (iSocialFanz)
Building Apps on SAP HANA Cloud Platform
July 11, 11.00am EDT / 8.00am PST
www.sapstore.com/hcp

https://www.facebook.com/SAPStore/videos/1225199084192220/

Brian Fanzo: All right, we are live! Welcome to…its actually Day 1, and our first show here on Facebook live, well we’re taking over SAP Store's FB account and page, Monday through Thursday this week, really embracing live streaming, trying out a couple of different things. My name is Brian Fanzo (better known at iSocialFanz on Twitter). I'm a change evangelist, I work with brands as a thought leader and industry experts from a technology space, working with them to embrace live streaming and new ways for them to tell their digital story. I'm also the host of a podcast called SMACTalk (which stand for Social Mobile Analytics and Cloud) as well as a show actually sponsored by our friends at SAP called Cloud Talk that happens every single Thursday at noon Eastern time - we've been doing that a little over a year - we talk everything cloud computing. So today, we're going to talk a little bit about SAP HANA Cloud Platform, but before we get in there, I want to go ahead and introduce our guest, so Daniel, welcome, and go ahead introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your background and we'll get into this topic.



Daniel Szabo: Thank you Brian. Hi everyone, its really great to be on this show. My name is Daniel Szabo and I work with the SAP Digital team. My primary focus is on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform portfolio products, which include the following products:



Brian Fanzo: When you say cloud, this is one of the interesting things we talk about on our show every week is the idea of cloud and we always joke that half the time when people say cloud they look up into the sky as if the servers lived in the sky up in the clouds, but could break it down what is SAP HANA Cloud Platform and what does it exactly entail, because on the SAP Store there are so many new ways to consume resources, technology and software, but give us a background on SAP HANA Cloud Platform.



Daniel Szabo: Sure, and its actually interesting that you mentioned the expression "cloud. I'm not sure who came up with the expression first, but its basically referring to the trend and technology that most companies are looking to leverage: its about reducing your costs and pushing some of the work to other companies / vendors to do for you. For example, looking at the trends, we see a big boost in ecommerce and 3 trillion dollars worth of GDP is being created just as a result of ecommerce that we haven't seen before. People talk about IoT (Internet of Things), the 20 billion devices by 2020 (I heard somewhere 50 billion devices..) Whatever that number is, if you talk to developers and ask them to connect just 3 devices, it might seem like a simple thing, but they will need to leverage and work with cloud platforms to do these.



Brian Fanzo: I think this is really interesting because I also think of these new devices as new moving parts...One of the most exciting things for me is that I went to school for computer science, I loved being a coder but that wasn't my forte - I joke because one of the big booming areas of technology today is really the app developer space and as crazy as it sounds, a lot of this app developer space didn't exist 10 years ago, because not only did cloud apps not exist, but we didn't have an iPhone at that time,  we didn't have the smart phone as we know it today. So when you're thinking about this from SAP HANA Cloud Platform and about these offerings fit in these, where is the developer, how does this impact the developers?



Daniel Szabo: Absolutely, and you mentioned mobile which is probably one of the most exciting areas: 70% of the new content is being created by mobile users and when we look at consumer trends vs. enterprise trends, the boundaries seem to be becoming less and less, and these two groups are kind of combining and you see the features that you are used to in your consumer life that you would want to leverage in your enterprise life. What this means for the developers? Developers are typically looking to do a couple of key things:

  • Build something (= cloud apps)
  • Deploy (in their cloud environment)
  • Manage (in an easy / simple way)

Definitely mobile is a key trend, and SAP HANA Cloud Platform has a rich set of services of which the mobile service is one. It allows you to build responsive enterprise-grade applications. There is another very simple to use tool, which is SAP Web IDE with which you can easily create these applications (includes features like WYSIWYG, drag and drop) - pretty smooth. I love how easily you can create a mobile app - anyone can basically create a mobile app within 5 to 25 minutes, I've done it its easy, you have everything that is needed. But at the end its really about creating business value and hopefully by using these, you will be able to reduce your costs (=save) and increase your revenue by adding extra value to either your employees or your customers.



Brian Fanzo: I love that and my co-host Daniel on our SMAC Talk Show always says nobody buys technology for technology sake we buy that to solve business problems and to provide business solutions, that's spot on. I love the idea that anyone can build an app, because it was a very foreign concept and then it seemed to be a very expensive concept. I've been doing a lot of work with SAP, I was at SAPPHIRE NOW broadcasting there. I was really blown away by SAP SQL Anywhere and SAP taking a lot of their solutions to small and medium sized businesses, something that I wasn't as familiar of. SAP to me was always large enterprise, it was always about the big enterprise play but there are so many solutions out there like Cloud Computing as a whole. And now you can swipe your credit card and go, go on demand. It's interesting to see how these are changing and how these worlds are coming together. How does someone end up purchasing SAP HANA Cloud Platform, how does it work? We normally would have not thought this but how do they get involved, how do they bring this to their business?



Daniel Szabo: That's a great point Brian and when you mentioned the business, actually 7 out of 10 CIO's look at a Platform-as-a-Service offering as the key, the number one tool to drive value, get insights from leveraging their data. It's pretty simple, purchasing the product you can do so by going on the www.sapstore.com/hcp. But here is a little exciting announcement that not many people might know, that we have a free edition. We recently launched this year the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, user-based packages. This is a different way of thinking about how people can leverage the platform. Simple pricing, no hidden costs, you know how much you are going to pay and how many users you will start with. You can start pretty small, try out he free edition allows up to 10 users, includes 120 MB SAP ASE. It does not include SAP HANA, but for that you can purchase the single app edition which is $430 / month for 10 users, I think its a really great price compared to other offerings. If we look at what is the real difference, many services and platforms out there will give you one month or whatever trial time. With the free edition you can go in three months increments and no limit on how long you do that. You can go with the free or upgrade easily. That is what we have been working on, to make sure that there is a seamless path, you can purchase them via credit card in 190 countries, so there is no limit to where you can purchase from. You could be an enterprise buyer or an individual from an enterprise. What is different? SAP HANA Cloud Platform offers access to SAP HANA, which gives you the opportunity to leverage live data, super fast in-memory DB / platform that has no competitor out that that I have seen works so well and the rich set of services which are constantly updated like mobile, collaboration. And another important service is security, which more and more people are looking into and getting secure solutions. This not only means having these security features, but if you think of single sign-on you also want that convenient experience. SAP has all of these services offered to you within one PaaS solution.



Brian Fanzo: That's exciting, the idea that we're bringing these world together. I worked at a Data Center company and moving into Cloud Computing. A lot of the early failures in Cloud Computing was siloed integration, siloed deployment, really even siloed purchasing because one person was buying a Big Data solution one person was buying a cloud solution they're also implementing a mobile solution underneath that, and what technology was going to integrate that? Cloud computing is part of the path towards success, and I love the live data aspect, I know at SAPPHIRE NOW everything is live, and I work with a lot of live streaming as well. (FB comment) Thank you guys all for watching and please feel free to share this!

We talked about SAP HANA Cloud Platform and how you can purchase through SAP Store. There are different offerings, where shall they start and how shall they integrate that offering moving forward?


Daniel Szabo: Yes, and let me touch on the integration piece, because one of the features developers love the most is the integration service. There are basically two components:

  • Cloud Connector (all editions have it)
  • Integration Service (multiple app edition only)

Even with the free edition you get the Cloud Connector, but with the multiple app edition you also get the integration service, formerly known as HCI (HANA Cloud Integration) which allows you to do real cloud-t0-cloud scenarios. SAP has 110 million cloud subscribers, think of how SAP is thinking of serving these customers, 300k plus customers, 12k partners - its a huge ecosystem and when you talk to the IT folks, developers, they're not only dealing with one system and one cloud provider - the sales team might have their own CRM, sometimes its the LOB driving the demand for this. SAP offers real cloud-t0-cloud scenarios to connect your on-prem, cloud systems and get data wherever you need it the most, for your field workers, employees, in an HR scneario, etc.

Where to get started? Depends on where you are within your journey, but perhaps I would get started with the free edition. If you already know what you would like to do, go with the single app edition or the multiple app edition.

  • the single app edition is for one enterprise application with 10 GB SAP HANA, mobile services, SAP Jam and many more. You can simply upgrade if you need more than 10 users. If you need more power,
  • the multiple app edition offers you that and the integration service as well, along with unlimited number of apps.

To get started small, go with the single app edition. Whenever you feel more, upgrade.




Brian Fanzo: I love that, especially in the data center space, before, the idea of predicting your compute was an algorithm and real estate play - what are we going to use the next 7 years and how are we going to afford to put the technology in place even though we aren't going to scale up to that in the next 5 years. Now, we're going to scale as we need it, we're gonna add new users, new layers of compute as we go. Scale across everything - probably is the biggest aspects of business success, so much change everywhere. Even Facebook Live, if you're predicting your marketing budget previously, FB Live didn't even exist, and now its a solution that's adding more video to your repertoire, you might need more of those solutions. As we are on the SAP Store and talking about SAP HANA Cloud Platform, what's next? How does a user move forward, what are the next steps as we move forward integrating in our business?



Daniel Szabo: The big idea here is the ecosystem. Looking at what SAP HANA Cloud Platform means for the ecosystem, its basically the glue. And that's how its meant to be leveraged. You have a bunch of different systems: you have old on-prem systems or new which you want to keep on prem it could be a hybrid scenario, but always a c0lorful landscape. SAP HANA Cloud Platform helps you connect these and mine out the data that is in your systems but you're not making use of the innovative technology SAP HANA is for live insights. What is next? There are constant updates to the platform. Get started on OpenSAP or HANA Academy free courses, or tune in to the SAP Community Network (SCN), there are a lot of great discussion, exciting customer storied. Every customer is a bit different because their IT landscape is different, their developers are different, but the fact that this is an open platform, and that there is a lot of new features & updates coming like Cloud Foundry (beta available!), these are opening up the ecosystem, not to mention the recent SAP & Apple partnership where we partnered to build the SDK and allow this huge community to build beautiful breathtaking experiences.



Brian Fanzo: As we push boundaries, as we start integrating not only cloud solutions, but thinking about live data... real time is easy, but figuring out the right time is extremely hard, and to optimize at the right time, you have to have fully integrated solutions, you have to work across platform and you have to be able to scale by adding compute and users and on demand. I love where SAP HANA Cloud Platform is moving. Anything else you would like to address as we wrap up the first show of the week?



Daniel Szabo: Try out the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, there are over 1000 apps on the HANA App Center that our partners have built, look at what is the right path for you, try out the platform. You could be developing an app and using to monetizing it through the SAP Store, or use it to build, extend your applications, or help your customers achieve their business goals. Check it out, its free, easy to get started and if there's anything else I can help with, happy to do so.



Brian Fanzo: I love it and thanks for taking the time! With Facebook Live, we're working to bring the conversation where the audience is. The SAP Store's website is completely interactive, easy to navigate, download, understand your trials. Thanks for joining Daniel, appreciate it!



Daniel Szabo: Thank you Brian!

www.sapstore.com/hcp

More videos on the SAP Store's FB page.