What distinguishes the different models (of cloud services as well as pizza) is the degree of the necessary infrastructure, supplies, and services you are able to control compared to the ones you have to “take-or-leave”: As most of us realize, there are several options available for obtaining pizza, ranging from genuine homemade to dining out and several options in between, as shown in Figure 8.1.įIGURE 8.1 Different options for getting a pizza. To understand the options relevant for SAP, it is helpful to take a look how other services are offered in the market.Īn example that can in help understanding cloud concepts involves the provisioning of pizza for a family dinner. The cloud definitions of the National Institute of Standards and Technology 1 are so general that they are not much help in understanding cloud options.

Obviously, every vendor defines its own cloud according to the product portfolio it has available.

What Kind of Cloud?ĭiscussions about the cloud tend to contain a confusing variety of acronyms. To business readers, it makes no difference whether SAP runs on premise (in a company’s in-house datacenter) or out on the cloud somewhere, so you may skip the first half of this hour and move directly to the section “Newly Acquired SAP Solutions,” which describes SAP’s new solutions. In this hour, we provide a general overview of these solutions, how they fit into the big picture, how they are used, and the value they provide. With HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) and HANA Cloud Platform (HCP), SAP also added Platform as a Service (PaaS) and hosting services to its portfolio.

Among these acquisitions are several cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions that were already successful on the market. Examples from the past include Business Objects, Kiefer & Veittinger, and Sybase’s database technologies.Īt this writing, Wikipedia lists 59 SAP acquisitions, with Concur Technologies being the latest.

New SAP solutions: SuccessFactors, Ariba, Fieldglass, Concur, and hybrisĭespite its great tradition of in-house developments from R/3 to HANA, SAP has never been shy about acquiring other companies to extend its application portfolio and gain access to new technologies.

Running classic SAP solutions on the cloud.

The different flavors of cloud services for SAP.

Ariba fieldglass