SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC)

Here’s short recap for those of you who didn’t notice yesterday’s rush on e.g. twitter regarding SAP’s announcement. If you are twitter familiar you can look up a hash tag #simplyHANA as event was covered by that tag. 

Basically what was said is that SAP is moving its HANA solution more and further into the cloud. So called SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) was announced. It is another SAP’s cloud initiative (SAP HANA One – developer or business editions, just to mention very few related to the HANA). This is about HANA going on large scale. SAP believes that in future even companies with mission critical systems (e.g. from banking, pharma industries) will put their applications, infrastructures and all platforms into the cloud. Given this SAP is offering possibility to run customer’s apps on top of a cloud-based version of HANA in-memory DB technology. Basically this is an essence what was the event about. They emphasizing that they could run also big apps like data warehouses (SAP BW), CRM, ERPs apps. There was short demo of app called Cloud Frame Monitor. The app enables to configure and deploy HANA instances over the cloud. Like customer can configure, dynamically add more power (more CPUs, nodes) and storage to the running app as needed. 

From licensing point of view it was said that customer needs to have HANA license as well as app license (BW, CRM, ERP, ...). They app is deployed into SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud which will use most likely subscription pricing model.

See all of Vishal Sikka’s thoughts of the announcement here.

To me personally I’m even more confused what I heard at event. It looks like potentially SAP would run their (own?) data centers with offering of having customer’s apps running in those so called SAP’s clouds. This is very new to current status as SAP is relaying on partner (amazon’s AWS, cloudshare, ucloud, etc.) cloud to run SAP’s apps. Would SAP invest into the data centers? Maybe they gained some while acquisitions of ariba and successfactors?  

Let's see if next week's Sapphire conference in Orlando will give more clarify about SAP HEC.

For event’s whole reply look here.