I’ve been doing further research on the HANA Enterprise Cloud - in particular, the broader ecosystem surrounding the new offering - and I keep stumbling across references to certified HANA Enterprise Cloud partners.
[SOURCE]
I imagined myself as a customer – excited / intrigued by this new solution - looking for such partners. I decided to document my attempt – which was largely unsuccessful – and provide suggestions on how to improve such searches.
Note: This blog doesn’t delve into the problem concerning the meaning of a “HANA Enterprise Cloud certification”, because I failed to find a definition of it. Expertise with the underlying HANA technology? Support of certain SLAs? Experience with a certain consulting methodology? I’d expect something similar to that available for SAP-certified Cloud Services Providers. Here is a short description of this certification:
To ensure ongoing, high standards for management of SAP solutions, certified providers undergo an extensive assessment by SAP to validate the operational integration of their cloud services with supported SAP applications. The audit also includes technical reviews of physical and logical security processes supporting those cloud services. This entire process undergoes a recertification process every two years. Currently, the certification is focused on providers offering private cloud services for managing SAP solutions. [SOURCE]
This information might be available to potential partners in the protected Partner Edge site but as a customer, it is important to understand what a certification includes and what is not included.
The Search
When the HANA Enterprise Cloud was announced in May, there was an associated announcement about partners:
SAP today announced the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud partner program, which will aim to provide participants access to enablement, best practices and other resources to leverage the recently announced SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service [SOURCE]
There was a list of companies that were initial pilot partners and that agreed to participate in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud partner program - each company provided a supportive quote.
This initial list was created for the HEC announcement in May. Since its creation, there has been very little publicly available information about this partner program.
On my search for certified HEC partners, I decided that this list would be a good starting point My first problem was the question: these were participants in the partner program but were they were certified? The relationship between this partner program and certification wasn’t described any where.
I tracked down further HEC-related information about some of these partners.
Partner | Comment |
|---|---|
This is the only press release from a partner that specifically mentions SAP-Certified Provider of Hosting Services for SAP HANA® Enterprise Cloud | |
This press release – which describes Savvis’ subscription-based services for SAP HANA - sure sounds like HEC but it predates the HEC announcement. | |
Virtustream (General cloud, HANA Enterprise Cloud) | These two different press releases show the distinction between broader Cloud Hosting and HEC-associated hosting. |
Note: These partners are probably certified but I was unable to find any publicly available material supporting this assertion.
Note: There might be other partners which are HEC certified service providers but I failed to find them in my searches.
A suggestion to solve this problem
The HEC is critical in SAP’s cloud and HANA GTM strategy and will be successful only if the partner ecosystem energetically embraces it. If customers are unable to find such certified partners, a critical prerequisite for this mass adoption is missing.
A perfect opportunity exists to solve this gap via the existing Certified Outsourcing Partners list
In the current implementation of this list, partners can be identified as being certified in various areas:
 |  |
This site must be adopted so that HEC-certified partners can be easily found. This would mean adding “HANA Enterprise Cloud” to the search criterion. Furthermore, certified partners would be identified as such:
This change should be easy to implement and would allow customers to find such partners quickly
SAP should have an interest to move in this direction but I would expect those partners that are already HEC-certified to be clamoring for such changes. As more and more companies move towards HEC certification, those early adopters still have a window of opportunity to gain and solidify market share before the market becomes more crowded.
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