by twieberneit | Mar 10, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
On Mach 8, 2017, SAP and Google announced another marriage in the cloud during Google’s Cloud Next event: SAP HANA is certified on Google’s Cloud Platform GCP, and is generally available now. SAP Cloud Platform and more products and solutions are to follow. The Google Cloud Launcher marketplace will be utilized to offer and deploy to and for customers and partners, starting with SAP HANA, express edition, which is already available, too. Further topics that are covered by this partnership are Improving Google’s containerization technologies for enterprise workloads Security, privacy, and integrity of customer data in the cloud. As part of this SAP software shall act as a data custodian (NB: How that works in legal and political environments remains to be seen) and joint solutions for access control, governance, risk and compliance shall get developed Integrate Google’s G Suite into SAP applications. This has already been implemented for Identity and Access Management. More on the still fuzzy side are end-to-end integrations and collaborations in the areas of AI and machine learning. True to the SAP mantra of being an ecosystem player this is all about choice – choice for the customer to implement what is best for them. My Take Another interesting one! Good Win for SAP SAP now covers all major cloud platforms. HANA is now certified on AWS, Azure, and GCS, apart from running in the SAP cloud. With this SAP now has the broadest footprint when it comes to running on an IaaS platform. With the SAP Cloud Platform being available soon there also will be a very powerful PaaS solution on one of the...
by twieberneit | Jan 12, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
On January 10, 2017, SAP announced a bundling of their IoT portfolio of initiatives to focus on business outcomes instead of technology while combining the set of emerging products and solutions under the brand name Leonardo – as in Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the most forward looking artists and innovators ever. This announcement substantiates SAPs commitment to invest two billion Euro in IoT over the next 5 years. The new portfolio will combine adaptive applications, big data and connectivity as packaged line-of-business solutions, covering a range of topics. It bases upon a rebranded – and repackaged(?) HANA Cloud Platform, enhanced by the micro services for machine learning that were announced earlier and which I covered here. This enhanced platform is now called SAP Cloud Platform. As per a blog post accompanying the Leonardo announcement, the high level architecture of SAPs new offering looks like below and covers, besides a set of existing applications an IoT adapter – SAP Leonardo for Edge Computing – which serves as a device independent data input layer, essentially a kind of middleware, probably built on or using HCI. a foundational layer – SAP Leonardo Foundation – which includes the IoT business services that are to be exposed, enabling rapid development of applications. This makes up the functional core. and a ‘bus’ layer – SAP Leonardo Bridge – which enables the combination of real time data with applications and processes Leonardo is accompanied by a jump-start enablement program to accompany this initiative. This program includes introductory pricing and is intended to help organizations identify and validate IoT pilots and use cases, including expert staffing...
by twieberneit | Jan 10, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
Last week Freshdesk announced the acquisition of Bengaluru based SaaS data integration company Pipemonk, the seventh acquisition since mid of 2015. Pipemonk has been launched in 2014 and since has implemented integrations between many leading e-commerce-, accounting-, CRM-, Marketing-, and Billing applications, including Amazon, Shopify, Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Stripe. So far Freshdesk was not on their list. Pipemonk’s promise and objective is to deliver easy-to-setup, pre-built bi-directional integrations between SaaS applications. On their web site they reported to have more than 2,000 customers acquired in the short life span, with a seed capital of only 2 million dollar. So one can say that they delivered successfully. Freshdesk itself has its roots in customer service and since increased its portfolio to include help desk (hotline), a sales application (Freshsales), chat (Freshchat) and social testimonials using acquisitions and own developments. My Take I think that this was an important step for Freshdesk. It enables Freshdesk to easily expand its reach to integrate with a raft of SaaS applications in different business domains, prebuilt or custom. Further, I was wondering for a while whether and how Freshdesk would go on integrating their own application stack, which as per my understanding so far consists of different, only lightly (if at all) integrated applications – although my understanding may be wrong. Assuming that Freshdesk intends to continue their aggressive growth trajectory with this acquisition the team also has the foundation to integrate new and newly acquired functionality fast, based upon an established architecture. Overall, congratulations to both...
by twieberneit | Nov 9, 2016 | Analysis, Blog |
Yesterday SAP announced SAP HANA 2, an updated and improved version of its flagship product SAP HANA, and new SAP HANA microservices through SAP Hybris as a Service. SAP HANA 2 will be available for first customers on November 30 and an express edition shortly after its general availability. Note: if SAP talks about RTC this usually differs from General Availability, which is only after a successful ramp-up period of about 3 months to validate a product with early adopter customers. So the Express Edition will probably be released around end of Q1/2017. In usual bold marketing words SAP HANA 2 is poised to be a “new foundation for digital transformation” and is according to Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board, Products and Innovation at SAP SE, the continuation of “breakthrough innovation on a highly stable core data platform for our customers”. SAP HANA 2 shall deliver enhancements in the areas of database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application management as well as well as two more services for cloud customers: Text Analysis and Earth Observation Analysis. The latter in a beta status only. These latter two new HANA functionalities are likely to be the reason of tying the two announcements. The update cycle of HANA 2 shall be 6 months. Some Observations It is interesting that SAP refers to the new HANA services as microservices. This suggests that these services are built on top of the HANA 2 core – or else HANA itself has been rearchitected to be built on a microservice architecture. I rather think the former, also as the delivery is via YaaS....
