I received a number of questions around the account and credentials terminology for SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) after publishing my first set of tutorials available on the SAP Developer Center, but also while staffing the TechEd AppSpace last year,

First of all, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform delegates the authentication and identity management to an Identity Provider (IdP).

Therefore, none of your account details and credentials are physically stored on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. By default, SAP HANA Cloud Platform including the Developer Trial uses the same IdP as most of SAP’s web sites, a SAP Cloud Identity server (http://accounts.sap.com).

This means that if you can “login” to any other SAP’s web site that uses this IdP, you will not need to create a new account for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, but reuse your existing account and just agree to the “Terms and Conditions” of use, as well as the “SAPs privacy statement” while accessing it for the first time.

For more around information about the “Identity and Access Management” functionality for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, use the following link:
https://help.hana.ondemand.com/help/frameset.htm?e6b196abbb5710148c8ec6a698441b1e.html 

But let’s take a step back, and let’s have a look at the SAP HANA Cloud Platform login process.

Login to the SAP HANA Cloud Platform

To login to the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, you will need credentials. This is probably what confuse most users as the user name can be multiple for a single user.

For example, you can use the following user names:

• an email address
• a user id (as an SAP employee I have my I-number)
• a login name (a chosen identifier)

Now, let’s see what’s yours! Open the following address in your browser: https://accounts.sap.com

So now, you know what to use to connect to your SAP HANA Cloud Platform account.

As stated earlier, I’m an SAP employee in France so my “User ID” starts with an “I”, some of my colleagues have ones that starts with a “C” or a “D”. I tend to use this one (my User ID) to login as it’s way shorter than the others.

But as I’m not expecting only SAP people to read this, so here what our HCP developers and users should be using:

• If you are an SAP customer or partner, you will probably already have an “S” user that allows you connect to various system at SAP
• For those without any relations with SAP (yet), you will most likely have a trial account that starts with a “P”. This is provided to you after you used the “Register” link for the first time.

These will be fairly long numbers (at least 8 to 12 number long), and many don’t remember them. So my advice here is to use your email address or the login name you have set (which can be changed in the IdP if you want as long as it remains unique in the IdP).

Now let’s have a look at the SAP HANA Cloud Platform Developer Trial account.

SAP HANA Cloud Platform Developer Trial

The SAP HANA Cloud Platform Developer Trial is accessible at the following URL:

https://account.hanatrial.ondemand.com/cockpit#/welcome/overview

Once you have logged in to the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, you will first access the SAP HANA Cloud Platform Cockpit “overview”.

The Developer Trial is located in the Europe (Trial) landscape (sorry for the folks around the world, but all developer trial accounts are in Europe for now).

Now, what is my SAP HANA Cloud Platform account name on the Developer Trial landscape?

So based on the screenshot above, my account name is my “User Id” (as listed in the IdP) followed by trial, so in my case iXXXXXtrial (where XXXXXX is my I-number).

Actually no, it’s not! It’s just my account display name displayed here (above).

On the Developer Trial, the account display name & the account name are the same by default when you create your account, but you can update your account display name using the “pen” icon.

Let’s click on the account display name which will get you to your account dashboard:

The account dashboard include a tile at the bottom showing you your account name and the account display name.

You can also notice that the URL in your browser address bar always includes your account name:

https://account.hanatrial.ondemand.com/cockpit#/acc/xyztrial/accountdashboard

Ok, now you may say: “what’s the difference with productive accounts?”

SAP HANA Cloud Platform productive account

On the productive landscapes side (and we now have 6 of them around the world), the approach is slightly different.

As a customer (or partner), you will first get access to your “global account” on the productive landscape that you choose to work on.
This “global account” will be provisioned with a set of resources (services, Java units, database instances etc.).

Just like on the Developer Trial, your global account will have a display name and an identifier (look at the address bar), but these are not really used, only the accounts that you will create within the global account will.

So inside of the “global account”, you will be able to create as many accounts as you’d like.

When you create an account within your “global account”, you will be able to provide the display name, but an account name will be generated and assigned automatically.
The generated account name is made of 9 alpha numeric characters and will be included in the URL everywhere. Later, you will be able to change the display name but not the account name (and this is probably why people refers to it as the account id).

For example, this is a productive account I’m currently working on. The global account is named “Developer Destination”.

If I click on the “global account” name, I’ll be redirected to the “overview” where we have created one account:

The account display name is “Developer Relations Account”, and if you use the flip icon on the bottom right corner of the tile you will be able to see the account name:

And finally if you click on the account display name (now you have no excuses to search which one it is), you will get access to your account dashboard where your account information are displayed (account display name and account name):

I hope this little blog will help you find your way in the SAP HANA Cloud Platform account related terminology, and facilitate your experience with the Developer Center tutorials around SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

As usual, feedbacks, comments and proposals are very welcome!