Summary of this morning’s keynote (replay available online within 24 hours):
- Have seen “HANA effect” over past 2.5 years, and see HANA is being not just a commercial success for SAP but a change in the landscape for enterprise customers. A key technology to help people do more.
- Partnerships with SAS, Amazon, Intel, Cisco, Cloud Foundry.
- Enterprise cloud and cloud applications.
- SuccessFactors Learning products.
- 1000 startup companies developing products on HANA.
- Team of 3 teenagers using HANA Cloud and Lego to build shelf-stacking robots.
Q&A with audience (in person and online):
- SAP has always had an excellent technology platform for building applications, used to build their core enterprise applications. HANA is the latest incarnation of that platform, and one that they are now choosing to monetize directly as an application development platform rather than only through the applications. HANA Enterprise Cloud and HANA Cloud Platform are enterprise-strength managed cloud versions of HANA, and HANA One uses AWS for a lower entry point; they’re the same platform as on-premise HANA for cloud or hybrid delivery models. I had a briefing yesterday with Steve Lucas and others from the Platform Solution Group, which covers all of the software tools that can be used to build applications, but not the applications themselves: mobile, analytics, database and technology (middleware), big data, and partners and customers. PSG now generates about half of SAP revenue through a specialist sales force that augments the standard sales force; although obviously selling platforms is more of an IT sell, they are pushing to talk more about the business benefits and verticals that can be built on the platform. In some cases, HANA is being used purely as an application development platform, with little or no data storage.
- Clarification on HANA Cloud: HANA Enterprise Cloud is the cloud deployment of their business applications, whereas HANA Cloud Platform is the cloud version of HANA for developing applications.
- SAP is all about innovation and looking forward, not just consolidating their acquisitions.
- Examples of how SAP is helping their partners to move into their newer innovation solutions: Accenture has a large SuccessFactors practice, for example. I think that the many midrange SIs who have SAP ERP customization as their bread and butter may find it a bit more of a challenge.
- Mobile has become a de facto part of their work, hence has a lower profile in the keynotes: it is just assumed to be there. I, for one, welcome this: mobile is a platform that needs to be supported, but let’s just get to the point where we don’t need to talk about it any more. Fiori provides mobile and desktop support for the new UI paradigms.
As with the keynote, too much information to capture live. This session was recorded, and will be available online.