At the Mobile World Congress 2017 conference this week, SAP revealed it is revamping its approach to building enterprise applications to be more inclusive of databases other than the SAP HANA in-memory computing platform. As part of that effort, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform has now been formally renamed the SAP Cloud Platform.
In addition to rebranding its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment, SAP announced that it has developed a graphical SAP Cloud Platform Workflow service through which organizations can compose applications spanning multiple legacy and emerging microservices architectures.
At the same time, SAP formally launched SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services based on the Hadoop platform it gained via the acquisition of Altiscale and released a beta of version 4.0 of SAP Cloud Platform IoT service, which now supports over 40 protocols for provisioning IoT devices. Also on tap is a version of SAP API Business Hub, a catalog for sorting through all the application programming interfaces (APIs) that SAP supports, and an option to deploy third-party applications running on a virtual machine alongside applications running on the SAP PaaS.
Dan Lahl, vice president of product marketing for SAP, says SAP is now making a concerted effort to provide IT organizations via the SAP PaaS access to multiple open source databases, including Hadoop, alongside HANA.
“They now have the choice to use HANA or not,” says Lahl.
In total, Lahl says, there are now 6,500 customers and 650 partners using the SAP PaaS to develop applications, in addition to over 1,000 applications built by SAP.
In effect, SAP is recognizing that many organizations today are just as likely to build applications as they are to buy them. SAP clearly wants to be relevant across both ends of that spectrum, with an eye toward making sure that the new applications that are built don’t necessarily duplicate functionality that already exists in an SAP packaged application.
