ASUG just announced the results of their 2016 survey on SAP S/4 HANA and SAP HANA Cloud Platform. With regards to the HANA Cloud Platform Survey, there were no major surprises and from my perspective, much good news for SAP and our customers in the results. To learn more about the findings, read this exec
summary and listen to this
webinar on Jan 11
th. Here’s my take on what we learned, where SAP is at today, and where we are headed.
What we learned:
While the results showed one-third of the respondents are clear on what the value of SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) can do for them, one third needed more information to understand what they can do with HCP. The last one third responded they do not know what HCP is and what it can do for them. Clearly SAP has work to do here on HCP awareness.
Of those that are using HCP, 33% want to build applications on SAP HANA, ~33% want to fill functional application gaps in on-prem and SaaS applications, 18% are building brand new apps, and 9% want to build apps that they can sell.
So what are the key takeaways from what we learned?
- More companies are aware of HCP today than compared to a year ago. According to last year’s ASUG survey only about 14% had actually given HCP a tryout.
- We have some work to do on getting the 33% who don’t know about HCP to understand SAP has a customer innovation platform built for the cloud, both public and private. Even though HCP provides SAP HANA as a database service in the cloud (DBaaS), there are many more services available with HCP to make it a very comprehensive platform as a service.
- SAP needs to better educate the 33% of the survey respondents who need more information to help them understand how HCP can help them digitally transform and support their agile business initiatives.
- The 33% of the customers that want to build apps with HCP are taking advantage of HANA, and of those close to 33% want to build extensions or customize their on prem and SaaS apps to meet functionality gaps, and lastly, 18% want to create brand new apps.
Where are we today on general awareness?
General awareness on the value of HCP
Since it’s launch, SAP HANA Cloud Platform has evolved into a PaaS with over 40 application services. HCP has and continues to be an agile in-memory cloud development and deployment platform that helps our customers integrate, extend and build applications for their enterprise needs. SAP customers have various opportunities to learn more about HCP, including:
- HCP.SAP.com as the one-stop shop service for information on HCP, including direct access to the perpetual HCP trial account as well as the API Business Hub for testing APIs against existing systems.
- A free, perpetual trial license for getting up to speed on all the services available on HCP – signup here at hcp.sap.com by clicking on the top blue button labeled “Goto HCP”
- The SAP App Center, where SAP customers can find out more about apps that they can utilize to extend SAP applications or use right out of the box - now.
- Blogs on SCN with active contributions from our product teams, HCP users and partners.
- The SAP HANA Academy, where interested customers can watch short videos on how to use HCP to extend, build and integrate apps
- Free OpenSAP courses for HCP that provide classroom style and self-paced courses for customers to experience HCP utilizing their own HCP trial account to get hands-on experience
- SAP Events – HCP has seen a strong presence at SAP TechEd and the SAP SAPPHIRE conference as a strategic solution for SAP in keynotes and numerous sessions. Booth presence has also grown with hand-son tutorials for developing an HCP app at the TechEd App space.
- Industry events – HCP has also had booth and presentation presence at events such as Mobile World Congress, AWS rd:invent, Gartner Application Strategies and Solutions Summit, TDWI events, SAP Insider events, SuccessConnect, Ariba Live, CloudFoundry Summit and other industry events
- Numerous webinars run by our field marketing teams at a global level
- Social amplification of HCP at events through the Cube andSAP HANA Facebook Live
Understanding how HCP can be used
With over 40+ services in SAP HANA Cloud Platform today, our customers are discovering many new ways to innovate with HCP. Services such as IoT, predictive services, workflow, business rules, and of course HANA, offer SAP customers an array of capabilities to meet their growing digital transformation requirements. As we learned there is a growing number of customers using SAP HANA. So here are some examples of how customers are leveraging SAP HANA in HCP.
Using SAP HANA as a database service:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is leveraging SAP HANA in HCP and is integrating their landscape while building new applications.
- CAMPOSOL uses SAP HANA Cloud Platform to engage farmers to provide in-time and actionable data to their business while leveraging SAP HANA.
- PostNL, the postal carrier of the Netherlands has used HCP to integrate their applications landscape in order to serve up logistics and parcel delivery for their online traders and partners.
Extending and customizing applications
- Danone uses HCP to extend new functionality to many users. They’ve extended the integration with their backend SAP systems to build out next apps and features. Early success is a lightweight call center app in South Africa and web shop in Germany.
- Swarovski, a global leader in crystals and jewelry seller brought their entire catalogue of 40,000 crystals to life through a mobile application built on SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
Examples of new applications include:
- Kore, an automation BOT technology, company has used HCP to humanize the IoT by interpreting everyday actions in Cloud for Customer and SAP ERP applications. This application enables humans to chat with applications and kick off business processes.
- Bosch, which has used HCP and its IoT, services to build an entire truck-parking network to help reduce cargo theft and loss on many European highways.
We are rapidly on working with customers to tell their stories in videos and write-ups, articles. As evident in this year’s ASUG survey we too are seeing more customers than ever using HCP to build new applications, filling in application functionality gaps and using it with HANA. Many of these customer stories can be found on HCP.SAP.com under
success stories.
Where we are headed now?
SAP HANA Cloud Platform is evolving to become the platform of choice for SAP customers as their cloud innovation platform to integrate their landscape, build applications, and leveraging the power of SAP HANA.
We are proud to see many of our customers innovating on HCP. In working closely with them, they are helping shape the direction of HCP. With their input and vision, we’ve made strides in HCP’s overall product direction. As HCP moves towards being an open platform and portability being a key requirement, we are striving to make it easier for our customers to leverage the benefits of the cloud.
Today we have a beta version of HCP on Cloud Foundry and will continue to invest in making HCP Cloud Foundry and OpenStack ready. An HCP virtual machine service was available this past November to enable customers to run ANY application on HCP. At the same time, Hybris-as-a-Services, a microservices based technology, enables HCP customers to build micro applications and meter and bill for consumption and usage. Big Data with Hadoop support is coming in 2017, as is Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
We look forward to telling more of our customer stories of how HCP can help enterprises through their digital transformation journey. Our hope is that through our efforts and the efforts of our customers, the 2017 ASUG survey for HCP will show that EVERY ASUG customer is aware of HCP and many are gaining benefit from SAP’s Platform as a Service.
