The Cloud
The cloud is transforming business in a positive way, removing obstacles to growth and enabling better solutions to customers. Clients are now paying monthly for their software and likewise, by moving to the cloud, ISVs costs are monthly as well. This allows ISVs correlate costs to clients’ compute utilization, which gives a better understanding of the bottom line and eliminates capital expenses related to provisioning new servers, storage and networking in private hosted environment.
Software Vendors (ISVs) need to leverage the cloud in a manner that isn’t disruptive to their business, enables innovation, and simplifies deployment for customers. Companies are moving their business, internal and external, to the cloud.
ISVs that sell to businesses with limited or no technical resources, are providing hosting and administrative services to their customers. This requires large investments in data center, network and security infrastructure.
Delivering software solutions through the cloud enables vendors to reach wider markets, simplify and accelerate customer deployments, increase customer satisfaction, and create predictable revenue streams. For ISVs, it means not just being cloud-deployed, but also cloud-enabling your solutions.
Benefits of the Cloud
- Business Agility – The cloud allows an ISV the ability to quickly develop, deploy and modify applications to/for customers.
- Easier and simpler deployments – Applications for ISV customers can be quickly and inexpensively “spun-up” in a cloud instance, eliminating the need to install and maintain expensive and complex computer infrastructure.
- Simpler Infrastructure Deployments – No provisioning of hardware is required by the ISV customers. An instance can be quickly and directly deployed (“spun-up”) into the cloud with the capacity that customers need for all stages of application lifecycle.
- Smaller IT Staff – Cloud deployment eliminates or dramatically reduces the need for ISV customers to maintain an IT staff such system, network and database admins.
- Capacity on Demand – Sometimes referred to as “Elastic Capacity”. Providing the ability to scale-up and/or scale-down instances for ISV customers as their requirements change.
- Complete Application Lifecycle Support — One of the best features of moving to a cloud strategy is the ability for the cloud to easily support all stages of an application lifecycle: development, test, QA, and production. All at a much lower cost. An ISV is no longer required to install and maintain separate, costly infrastructure on premises for each lifecycle stage. Use the cloud to spin up instances when needed. Release the resources when no longer required. Flexibility, simplicity and cost-reduction.
Benefits for ISVs
- Self-service – Customers are always looking for easier and simpler acquisition experiences. By offering a cloud acquisition and deployment model, an ISV can effectively engage in “low-touch” or “no-touch” selling models. Customers can research, find, acquire and spin-up applications – all with little or no effort by the ISV. This dramatically lowers the cost of sales.
- Try-before-you-Buy – Cloud deployment will allow an ISV to offer “test” or “trial” versions/instances of their applications.
- Pay-as-you-Go – By offering a cloud deployment sales model, an ISV can offer customers low initial and recurring costs. In effect, customers can pay for what they need, when they need it. Large initial expenditures for software and hardware would no longer be required, making application acquisition (and sales) much easier.
- Scalability – The cloud offers an ISV the potential to “right-size”, to meet the application needs that supports a customer’s current requirements. Then, as those customer requirements change, the ISV can adjust “on-the-fly” the size of the instance. Adding or subtracting memory, processors, or even complete instances can be done easily. Multiple instances, replicated instances, backup instances, active-active disaster recovery scenarios can be quickly and cost-effectively implemented.
- Innovation – The flexibility of the cloud will permit an ISV to innovate quicker and easier. Test and development instances can be created (and released) easily and quickly. New/innovative customer requirements and scenarios can be quickly prototyped, developed and released – all in the cloud, without the expenditure of a costly on-premises infrastructure.
So how can you help your customers manage disruption, rethink business, and adapt their business models for today’s digital business model? How can you help them create new business value through rapid innovation and continuous process improvement? SAP Cloud Platform can enable and simplify this innovation and transformation.
What is the SAP Cloud Platform?
SAP Cloud Platform enables ISVs and software providers to create integrated and agile solutions, that facilitates the digital transformation of customers. The SAP Cloud platform, eliminates the need to build and maintain an entire infrastructure stack to develop and deploy applications. You can quickly develop and deploy new applications or extend existing applications, without disrupting existing software landscapes. A cloud platform eliminates the upgrade of your customers on-premises systems to enable the next product or version release.
SAP Cloud Platform is the agile platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for digital transformation, with comprehensive application development services and capabilities that allows businesses to collect, manage, analyze and leverage information of all types, to extend and connect to business systems, and to innovate new edge scenarios to allow the business to continuously adapt and advance.
The foundational core of the SAP Cloud Platform is the SAP HANA Platform. Deployable on premise or in the cloud, SAP HANA is an in-memory data platform that accelerates business processes, delivers business intelligence, and simplifies your IT environment. By providing the foundation for all your data needs, SAP HANA removes the burden of maintaining separate legacy systems and siloed data, so you can run live and make better business decisions in the new digital economy.
SAP HANA provides:
- Database Services
SAP HANA is a relational database management system (RDBMS). It combines OLAP and OLTP processing into a single in-memory database – eliminating disk bottlenecks and offering groundbreaking performance. This ACID-compliant, in-memory columnar database stores compressed data, offers parallel processing across multiprocessor cores, and supports single instruction multiple data (SIMD) commands.
- Analytics Processing
Leverage in-memory advanced analytical processing capabilities – text, predictive, spatial, event streams, and time series – to build intelligent applications that provide deeper insights at unprecedented speed. And take advantage of predictive analytics, machine learning, data mining, text analysis, and more. All on a single database instance.
- Application Development
Build smart, real-time applications that combine analytics and transactions – and deploy them on any device – with the SAP HANA in-memory application development platform which includes a wide range of tools, including a Web-based developer workbench and IDE. Create apps that offer personalized experiences and instant response times – and take advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and advanced analytics.
- Data Access
Get data from any source without sacrificing performance – with built-in data access, integration, and virtualization capabilities. The platform supports federated queries, data replication, remote data sync, and processes to improve data quality. Access data inside and outside your organization for full business visibility in a simplified IT landscape.
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