SAP Cloud

Bad luck for SAP and its existing customers, who had pinned all their hopes on the Hana Cloud Platform (HCP). The failure has now forced SAP to give the construct a new name in order to forget the old problems.

But even the innovators among SAP's existing customers now have a problem: There is no exit strategy.

The exit strategy

Bernd Martin, Area Director at Larsen & Toubro Infotech, answers the question: What opportunities do you give HEC and HCP in Europe?

"This is a particularly difficult question because there are some unclear factors at play here.

Of course, cloud scenarios make sense and the cloud will become established in more and more places over time. However, the risks cannot be overlooked. For example, there is no offer from SAP for a way back regarding licenses at HEC and HCP.

In both cases, the user loses quite a bit of autonomy. In the longer term, however, there can be no doubt that Hana in the cloud and Hana as an integrating cloud platform also have good chances in Europe."

SAP itself does not seem to be sure about the HEC and HCP opportunities: As recently as mid-September last year, SAP announced that it was supporting companies in their digital transformation with a range of new functions in the form of an update for the Hana Cloud Platform.

This includes the Personal Edition of Web Integrated Development Environment (SAP Web IDE) for offline development of applications, which in future will synchronize automatically when connected to the cloud.

With a Software Development Kit for Web IDE, new application templates can be easily created and integrated into Web IDE via partner tools.

There is also an open source template for the HCP Portal Service to share content and experiences within the community.

"The latest Hana Cloud Platform features have made our Platform-as-a-Service offering even more attractive to customers and partners.

Because with this innovation platform, they are able to quickly and flexibly develop user-friendly enterprise applications"

said Björn Goerke, executive vice president and corporate officer at SAP, at TechEd in Barcelona last year.

"By rapidly deploying new applications and services in the cloud while getting more out of on-premise solutions, enterprises can also better drive digital transformation."

Just a few months later, the relaunch came again in Barcelona: SAP Cloud Platform - previously known as Hana Cloud Platform (HCP) - includes numerous new business services and covers the most important business requirements.

HEC/HCP relaunches

It is intended to simplify the development of new applications and can form the basis for innovative scenarios for the Internet of Things (IoT).

The new and old platform is designed to accelerate Big Data projects and supports machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. This was announced at the Mobile World Congress at the end of February this year.

"Since the launch of our PaaS offering three years ago, it has become the preferred digital enterprise platform. It allows customers, partners and developers to build specialized solutions that intelligently connect people, devices and businesses.

To better reflect the platform's scope of capabilities, it has now been renamed SAP Cloud Platform."

was how Bernd Leukert, SAP's Chief Technology Officer, defined the new cloud from Walldorf.

"SAP Cloud Platform is a key success factor for digitization, connecting more and more smart devices and machines with people and processes."

According to SAP, a large number of SAP enterprise applications and over 1000 partner applications have already been created. New services will be added to the new SAP Cloud on an ongoing basis. These can form the basis for SAP Leonardo, SAP's portfolio of IoT applications that connects smart devices with people and processes.

Leonardo, in turn, is the logical evolution of the offering from Plat.One, an IoT platform provider that SAP acquired in the second half of last year. Accordingly, the SAP Leonardo offering is identical to the Plat.One portfolio.

A lot of innovation, little security

The SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS is scheduled to ship on March 30. It will give developers, designers and enterprises the tools and scalability they need to quickly and efficiently develop powerful enterprise applications for iPhone and iPad. These are based on the SAP Cloud Platform and are created using Apple's Swift programming language.

The Project Companion mobile application is also scheduled to be available on March 30. The native iOS application is integrated into the S/4 Professional Services Cloud solution via the SAP Cloud Platform. It uses real-time data and makes work much easier for consultants, project managers and other mobile users.

SAP Cloud Platform Virtual Machines were launched in the EMEA region in November 2016 and are scheduled to be available in the US in the first quarter. Customers can use them to set up comprehensive solution landscapes by adding workloads based on existing on-premise software or voice and runtime versions that can now run directly on SAP Cloud Platform.

SAP envisions the new Cloud Platform to be a flexible solution for cloud applications to extend SAP's digital core, including S/4, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Fieldglass, Concur.

With more than 1,000 applications developed by SAP and more than 600 partners on the Cloud Platform, both SAP customers and partners are expected to benefit from the cloud and connectivity to business networks.

IaaS: Cloudflare

Even though apparently HCP is now discontinued and dead, in all likelihood the infrastructure for SAP's PaaS offering will remain Cloudflare.

This global provider of cloud and hosting services is, of course, bound by US government and regulatory requirements as an American company.

Unlike the cooperation between Microsoft and Germany's T-Systems, users can never be sure where their data will end up. SAP would not comment to E-3 Magazine on why it chose an infrastructure provider like Cloudflare.

This makes the aforementioned exit strategy for SAP cloud users even more explosive. An intimate connoisseur of the scene and long-time SAP companion commented:

"See for yourself how to get your data back when the contract expires, if there's even a tool for that."

The basis for this skepticism and warning are SAP's cloud GTCs:

Customer may export and retrieve its Customer Data during a Subscription Term, which will be subject to technical limitations caused by factors such as (i) the availability of self-service extraction tools compatible with the Cloud Service, (ii) the size of Customer's instance of the Cloud Service; and (iii) the frequency and/or timing of the export and retrieval.

If an Order Form for Cloud Services expires or is terminated, Customer's access to the Cloud Service will be terminated. At Customer's request upon termination or expiration of the Order Form, SAP shall, within a reasonable time period, remove, delete, purge, overwrite or otherwise render inaccessible all Customer Data still remaining on the servers used to host the Service (excluding any Customer Data in the Ariba Network) to the extent possible based on the then-current technology available within the Service, unless and to the extent applicable laws and regulations require further retention of such data.

Apparently, SAP not only operates its cloud offering on an infrastructure that is difficult to access and control, but it also makes little effort to clean customer data from the hard drive if the customer explicitly asks for it, and only if there is no law against it.

For existing customers, this means that they not only have to worry about getting their data back as long as their account is still valid - as Bernd Martin, Area Director at Larsen & Toubro Infotech, is the first to publicly state - but also that nothing is left behind at SAP itself.

This is where a new discourse begins: What about the intellectual property of customer apps in the SAP Cloud?