SAP Cloud Platform – New Name or New Product?

Great post from Emily Mui at SAP. 

You might be wondering, what’s SAP Cloud Platform? Is it another SAP platform but cloud based? What happened to SAP HANA Cloud Platform? Are they one and the same? The answer is simple, SAP HANA Cloud Platform is now SAP Cloud Platform—and for 3 good reasons. While it may be tempting to think the marketers are “at it again” with name changes, this is a seemingly legitimate rebranding exercise.

Reason #1 – SAP HANA all the time!

At the airports, on television, you see it everywhere—SAP HANA has become a strong brand that has received wide-spread recognition in the business and technology world. But, SAP Cloud Platform has outgrown the name with “HANA” in it because it isn’t just about in-memory database services. It’s packed with a lot of cool technologies like the Internet of things (IoT), mobile, Hadoop in the cloud and more! Don’t get me wrong—SAP Cloud Platform still includes SAP HANA as a core service. In fact, in the last few years we’ve seen an increase in customers wanting to run their business in real time. A good example is CAMPOSOL, an agricultural company that uses SAP Cloud Platform to track and monitor in real time their farming process to ensure high quality and timely delivery of products such as blueberries and avocados.

So as great as SAP HANA is, SAP just want everyone to know that SAP Cloud Platform includes a lot of other cool technologies, too.

Reason #2 – SAP Cloud Platform is strategic to SAP

To date, SAP has introduced into the market a number of enterprise cloud applications built on top of SAP Cloud Platform (like SAP BusinessObjects Cloud, SAP Digital Boardroom, SAP Predictive Maintenance, SAP Product Stewardship Network, to name a few). It is also the platform for SAP Leonardo, SAP’s portfolio of IoT applications that connects intelligent devices with people and processes, and SAP Clea, the portfolio of Machine Learning apps. SAP Cloud Platform is also one of three strategic pillars of SAP solutions alongside SAP HANA Platform and SAP S/4HANA. See this new cool diagram to see how SAP Cloud Platform fits.

Reason #3 – SAP Cloud Platform Supports Digital Transformation

We’ve heard customers tell us what their digital transformation path is and the key benefits they need.

They want to be:

• Agile—Flexibility is critical in identifying and operationalizing new opportunities and delivering apps to support evolving business needs.
• Optimised—This requires ensuring their front and back ends are tightly integrated, and that their business processes and analytics are transparent to their users
• Digital—So they can use the latest technologies to not only be competitive but to innovate new products and services for their customers.
  SAP Cloud Platform helps companies by offering the core capabilities for them to build cloud apps to compete in the digital economy, extend applications so they can continue to leverage their existing IT investments and be agile, and integrate their IT landscapes so they can optimize their business processes and become more efficient.

Of course, innovation is key too. Just listen to companies like B. Braun and MAPAL tell you how they are able to run their business better through the apps built with SAP Cloud Platform or how Bosch is able to build an entire trucking network to reduce cargo theft and ensure drive safety.

The Bottom Line

SAP has seen a serious uptake of SAP HANA Cloud Platform in the last two years with 6,500 customers, 600+ partners developing applications, and over 1,000 apps available today.

With this growth, SAP Cloud Platform has evolved from an in-memory platform-as-a-service solution to an innovation platform in the cloud to support the multitude of business challenges that our customers face in their digital transformation journey— whether that’s monitoring production of fruits and vegetables to tracking surgical tools to creating a network for on-time cargo delivery and truck driver safety. SAP Cloud Platform now has over 40 application services designed to meet the needs of our customers and partners looking to leverage innovative technologies such as IoT, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and Big Data on a cloud platform.

Rebranding wasn’t just necessary—it was the right thing to do. Now, companies can understand the full breadth of capabilities that SAP Cloud Platform can deliver.