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How SAP Cloud Platform Powers the

Intelligent Enterprise – Part 2
October 2, 2018 | 1,836 Views |

Matthias Steiner
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SAP Cloud Platform

SAP TechEd | intelligent enterprise | sapcp

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Back in June during SAPPHIRE NOW I shared with you how SAP Cloud
Platform powers SAP‘s vision of an Intelligent Enterprise [1]. With today’s
blog post I want to follow-up and build upon that and provide further insights
and more technical depth. Yet, before we do so, let’s quickly recap on the
main idea behind “Intelligent Enterprise” and its main pillars.
Intelligent Enterprise

Over the past years SAP’s portfolio has been steadily growing into a
modular suite around SAP S/4HANA, the digital core, and complemented by
a comprehensive set of best-of-breed LOB cloud applications (Intelligent
Suite). At the same time, emerging technologies such as machine learning,
predictive & real-time analytics, Blockchain and IoT (Intelligent
Technologies) have redefined the art of the possible and customers
expectations alike. Fast growing data sets need to be transformed from Big
Data into Smart Data to ultimately allow businesses to make the right
decision at the right time. Hybrid IT landscapes spanning from on-premise
to cloud and being connected to larger business networks have become the
new normal.

The Intelligent Enterprise vision is SAP’s answer to support customers

and partners in this new era of intelligent computing and the technical
foundation and enabler of digital transformation is the Digital Platform:
SAP Cloud Platform and the SAP HANA Data Management Suite.

The role of SAP Cloud Platform

Consequently, SAP Cloud Platform is at the center of SAP’s technology
strategy. At SAPPHIRE NOW in June, SAP co-founder and Chairman of the
Supervisory Board, Hasso Plattner, summarised it best:

“SAP Cloud Platform is in the center.

Everything what we do now;
how we connect applications,
how we connect other applications,
how we present services we have in the system
for the use in applications or in Leonardo or outside SAP
will go through the SAP Cloud Platform.”
 – Prof. Dr. h.c. mult. Hasso Plattner (Chairman of the Supervisory
Board, SAP) [Source]

To elaborate on this, SAP Cloud Platform not only caters to runtime and
storage needs at scale, but also powers and exposes all the above
mentioned technologies so that these capabilities can be infused into new
cloud applications and services. It is the designated platform to build new
business applications, seamlessly extend existing cloud applications and
the central component for integration scenarios. In simple terms, SAP Cloud
Platforms addresses the following four key scenarios:

Integration,
Extensions,
Building new cloud applications and
providing a consistent and engaging (User) Experience

Ultimately, it caters to helping businesses to achieve greater business

agility by streamlining and optimising the development of new cloud
applications (build) and allowing them to subscribe to cloud solutions
provided by SAP and its entire partner ecosystem (buy).

With that said, let’s have a closer look at all these aspects by going through
them individually following a bottom-up approach.

Multi-cloud foundation
To abstract from the underlying infrastructure SAP Cloud Platform sits on
top of a multi-cloud layer that offers free choice of IaaS provider. As such,
customer and partners can pick their preferred choice, be it SAP or any of
the big hyper-scale cloud providers. This approach allows you to pick the
best-suited infrastructure provider(s) and datacenter(s) according to your
needs, addressing aspects such as legal requirements & compliance
considerations as well as enabling strategic co-location scenarios. Just
recently, Alibaba Cloud and SAP announced a strategic partnership to bring
SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud Platform to China [2].

NOTE: Going forward, SAP Cloud Platform will also be made available as a
private cloud edition. The first pilot projects are already underway and
conducted in a joint partnership with IBM and Atos.

In a similar fashion, SAP Cloud Platform also supports multiple,

complementing and interoperable environments. A few weeks ago, the new
ABAP environment was released as general available – I’m sure many (if
not all?) of you have already read the respective blog post from Harald
Kuck, right? [3]

But that’s not all… as you heard from Bernd Leukert in the opening keynote
SAP will complement its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities by
offering Kubernetes (Container-as-a-Service/CaaS) [4] and SAP Cloud
Platform Functions (Function-as-a-Service/FaaS) [5] in the near future. This
cloud-native core allows IT departments to freely choose the environment
that fits their need. Let me elaborate on that…

For the development of business applications and/or microservices the

PaaS environments (Neo/CloudFoundry and ABAP) are the recommended
option. If you need more direct infrastructure access or just want to port
existing, containerised applications to SAP Cloud Platform, then Kubernetes
may be a good fit. At the other side of the spectrum, if you just want to
define atomic, stateless functions that are executed on demand (via HTTP)
or triggered by events in a serverless fashion then Functions may be the
easiest and most cost efficient option.

Most importantly though, please note that all of these environments can be
used in conjunction as needed: the SAP Cloud Platform Service Manager
allows to lookup and bind service instances regardless of their hosting
environment. For example, while backing services that require large GPU or
Hadoop clusters (e.g. for machine learning or Big Data scenarios) may be
managed and operated via Kubernetes, they can be consumed by
applications running on Cloud Foundry.

This combination of multi-cloud infrastructure abstraction and cloud-native

technologies comprise the multi-cloud foundation of SAP Cloud Platform
that powers all services, capabilities and applications running on top (run-
on) and those leveraging said services (run-with).

Integrate
In context of the modular suite and hybrid IT landscapes Integration will
remain a key topic, because only “an integrated enterprise can become an
intelligent enterprise”. With the increasing adoption of cloud-based LoB and
industry solutions, and with the resulting shift to hybrid deployment models,
it is vital for SAP and our customers that end-to-end solutions are
developed and delivered. This convergence of cloud and on-premise
products into hybrid solution landscapes imposes several additional
challenges with respect to integration. For more details please read the
respective blog post [6] from my colleague Harsh Jegadeesan.
SAP Cloud Platform Integration services addresses these needs and as the
default integration solution for cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise by
offering out-of-the-box integration content and technologies for SAP
solutions and SAP-to-third party scenarios. Two new exciting additions to
this line-up are SAP Cloud Platform Open Connectors [7| and SAP Cloud
Integration Automation Service [8].

Extend
As already mention, SAP Cloud Platform is also the designated extension
platform supporting customers to extend any SAP application in a side-by-
side fashion, whether it’s on premise or in the cloud. This way customers
can avoid all the negative, long-tail consequences of over-customized
systems, that may have kept them from keeping up with the speed of
innovation delivered by SAP in the past.

In addition to the aforementioned ABAP environment and the upcoming

SAP Cloud Platform Functions capabilities, there are multiple other services
and solutions that address SAP S/4HANA and Cloud LoB side-by-side
extensions and custom code transformation to the cloud, such as the
recently updated SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK [9].

One of the most exciting news on that front is the SAP Cloud Platform
Extension Factory, which is currently being developed in a close
collaboration model between SAP Cloud Platform and the LOB solutions
such as Hybris. We are happy to provide a “lab preview” here at TechEd –
please read the respective blog post [10] from my colleague Rui Nogueira.

Build
One of the main talking points in Bernd Leukert’s opening keynote at SAP
TechEd 2018 in Las Vegas was “openness” and why only an open platform
& open ecosystem play can result in a positive-sum game for all. This
mindset has always been a main guiding principle for SAP Cloud Platform
from day one [11]. Consequently, SAP Cloud Platform leverages the de-
facto open-source standards such as Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes as
runtime environments (see above). This ensures a low entry barrier and
reduced total cost of development as developers do not have to learn about
proprietary technologies and can tap into the collective mind of the open-
source community at large.
As such, SAP Cloud Platform supports popular open-source frameworks
such as the Spring framework and others. At the same time though, a lot of
developers within the ecosystem have raised their interest to receive even
further guidance from SAP about how-to efficiently develop smart cloud
applications: enter Application Programming Model for SAP Cloud Platform.

In a nutshell, it’s an opinionated approach to develop cloud applications

using common technologies from SAP such as Core Data Services for
interacting with data and SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori at the presentation layer
with a RESTful programming model for business logic [12]. It’s an open
architecture that allows to exchange certain technologies with alternatives
as needed, e.g. by using Angular or React on the UX layer or to leverage
Spring in the business logic tier. It comes with full support by SAP Web IDE,
the recommended browser-based development environment and offers
plugins for popular development tools such as Eclipse and Visual Studio
Code going forward. If you want to check it out – this blog post by my
colleague Cecilia Huergo helps you to get started [13].

Those of you that are interested to learn how-to leverage the

aforementioned intelligent technologies on SAP Cloud Platform may want to
look into the following blog posts by Murali Shanmugham:

Try out Machine Learning services on SAP Cloud Platform [14] and
Creating blockchain based applications in SAP Cloud Platform [15]

Last, but not least… SAP Cloud Platform also caters to tech savvy people
without an engineering background (aka citizen developers) by offering
model-driven development tools such as the SAP Cloud Platform Rapid
Application Development by Mendix. Ohad Navon summarized the latest
updates for you in his blog post [16].

Experience
Last, but not least – let’s talk about the experience pillar. As customers
progress through their digital transformation and embrace and leverage
intelligent technologies, the way how end-users interact with systems and
the interaction between human and technology in general, is going to
fundamentally change. There will be an increased demand for self-service
and user-centric interfaces that allow users to seamlessly interact with
diverse application and backend technologies – via mobile interfaces, via
web interfaces or via speech. Processes will trigger human interaction,
systems will push alerts in case of unusual events and applications will
make recommendations on how to best act on certain situations.
SAP Fiori has been at the forefront of this change from complex,
transactional interactions performed by back-office experts towards more
lightweight, engaging user experiences happening on the go/ on demand
via various channels from traditional desktop applications, to mobile to
conversational and contextual UIs (e.g. Co-Pilot and chat bots).

Especially on the mobile front there’s been some exciting, new updates just
in time for SAP TechEd, for both the native SDKs as well as the Mobile
Development Kit. For further details please check out the following blogs:

Introducing Additional Mobile App Development Tools

What’s new in the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS 3.0
The SAP Cloud Platform SDK for Android is GA!

Wrap-up
Of course, I can only scratch the surface in this blog post and hence I would
like to wrap it up by recommending to you to closely watch the SAP Cloud
Platform blog roll to stay up to date.

For those of you at SAP TechEd in Vegas – the whole team is looking
forward to engaging with you and supporting you so that you are able to
fully leverage SAP Cloud Platform. As Bernd Leukert encouraged all of us in
his keynote: “It’s Time for Everyone to Build!”

PS:

Yes, given the time of publication (TechEd) the major focus of this blog post
has been on more technical topics catering to the developer ecosystems
and technologists. However, given that many of the topics covered are
included in the consumption based pricing model, let me add a link to the
blog post by my colleagues Holger Neuert summarising the latest updates
from a commercial perspective [20].

Further reading:
[1] How SAP Cloud Platform Powers the Intelligent Enterprise by
yours truly
[2] Alibaba Cloud & SAP: Leading Digital Transformation in
China by Bernd Leukert
[3] SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment by Harald Kuck
[4[ Cloud Native with Containers and Kubernetes – Part 1 by Alex
Braun
[5] SAP Cloud Platform Functions are beta now… by Joerg Singler
[6] Simplify Integration with SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite
by Harsh Jegadeesan
[7] SAP Cloud Platform Open Connectors is Live by Divya Mary
[8] New Scenarios for Cloud Integration Automation
Service by Stefan Jakobi
[9] SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK: Version 2.4.2 is Available by Henning
Heitkoetter
[10] The next evolution for extensions – the SAP Cloud Platform
Extension Factory by Rui Nogueira
[11] SAP Cloud Platform – A positive-sum game by Björn Goerke
[12] Introducing the new Application Programming Model for SAP
Cloud Platform by Daniel Hutzel
[13] Application Programming Model for SAP Cloud Platform in
Action! by Cecilia Huergo
[14] Try out Machine Learning services on SAP Cloud
Platform by Murali Shanmugham
[15] Creating blockchain based applications in SAP Cloud
Platform by Murali Shanmugham
[16] SAP RAD by Mendix: Recent Innovations for SAP Extensions
(TechEd 2018) by Ohad Navon
[17] Introducing Additional Mobile App Development Tools by Martin
Grasshoff
[18] What’s new in the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS
3.0 by Andreas Schlosser
[19] The SAP Cloud Platform SDK for Android is GA! by Britt
Womelsdorf
[20] Moving forward: Consumption based license model by Holger
Neuert

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5 Comments
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SVEN FEURER

October 18, 2018 at 12:04 pm

Awesome, thanks Mat for this great summary and explanation!

Matthias Steiner Post author

October 31, 2018 at 3:44 pm

Many thanks for the feedback Sven!

Murali Shanmugham

October 20, 2018 at 8:14 am

Great Summary as always 🙂

Interesting to hear about the role of the Service Manager. Is there a link where I can
find more info on this service?

Most importantly though, please note that all of these environments can be
used in conjunction as needed: the SAP Cloud Platform Service Manager
allows to lookup and bind service instances regardless of their hosting
environment.

Matthias Steiner Post author

October 31, 2018 at 3:52 pm

Hi Murali,

sure. The external name for this component is: Peripli – see
here: https://github.com/peripli

Best resource available (as of today) would be the SAP TechEd lecture:
[OPP201] Services Cross-Consumption in SAP Cloud Platform
 We are on it…

BR,

matthias

Murali Shanmugham

November 1, 2018 at 2:31 am

Thanks. OPP201 was helpful

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