BARCELONA—SAP HANA is no more. Long live SAP Cloud Platform.
At Mobile World Congress here, enterprise software corporation SAP announced a major expansion of its cloud infrastructure and platform services, ditching the longstanding SAP HANA name in favor of SAP Cloud Platform.
On top of the re-brand, SAP is rolling out new enterprise app development resources, workflow tools, and cloud-based services for virtual machines (VMs), Big Data projects, machine learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
Dan Lahl, Vice President of Product Marketing for SAP Cloud Platform, said this is more than a re-naming. He explained the news as a re-positioning for SAP complete with the cloud-computing features and services to back it up, all of which feed back into SAP's portfolio of business applications, which span from enterprise resource planning (ERP) to expense tracking and beyond.
"We've finally decided to go all-in on mode two cloud computing," Lahl told PCMag. "We've historically been an apps company, but the company is finally committing to cloud. Now we're building on the cloud platform to create a personal extension of any application or cloud environment."
SAP's portfolio of enterprise apps, including SAP SuccessFactors Perform and Reward, Concur ExpenseIt, and SAP Business One Professional, to name a few, as well as over 1,000 partner apps have already been built on SAP HANA. Lahl said the company and partners are already building 40 new enterprise applications on revamped platform. This includes beta iOS apps from SAP's partnership with Apple, for which the official software development kit (SDK) will be released on March 30.
Lahl said the iOS SDK is the biggest news aside from the SAP Cloud Platform re-brand, but also called attention to several new cloud-computing services the company is releasing. SAP is rolling out new cloud and mobile application programming interfaces (APIs) to the catalog in its SAP API Business Hub, as well as a new SAP Cloud Workflow service (also available on March 30) for business analysts, giving them a graphical interface to build business process workflows.
SAP is also expanding its VM workload service to the US, but Lahl is more excited about SAP Cloud Platform's new services concerning Hadoop Big Data processing and IoT stream management.
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"Virtual machines are cool, but we're not competing against AWS for the cheapest VMs," said Lahl. "More exciting is that we're adding Hadoop-as-a-Service through [our acquisition of] Altiscale. "Think about IoT. You have edge decisioning you're making in real time as the data streams into the data center, but you want to capture all of that for a Hadoop system to find out what's happening now, but also what happened last week and over the past month and the past six months.
"The IoT service coming out of beta supports over 40 different protocols and the scalability to provision and manage tens of thousands of machines in a network," Lahl continued. "Then the SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services tell you what's happening in your IoT tooling. Are there parts from the suppliers that aren't up to snuff? If you're working with fine machinery, you can go back to the manufacturer and say 'we need you to get better about this part.'"
SAP Cloud Platform underpins other SAP products spanning its SAP Leonardo IoT portfolio, SAP Clea machine learning services, and the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud portfolio including its SAP Digital Boardroom platform. The company also continues to develop new prototype applications through the Accenture Liquid Studio.