Accelerating Innovation with the SAP HANA Cloud Platform

Help Your Employees Help Themselves

Forgotten passwords and locked accounts can severely hinder employee productivity. In fact, more than a quarter of all help desk enquiries are related to resetting passwords or unlocking accounts. However, we believe it doesn’t have to be this way.

That’s why we developed the it.password manager, a self-service tool that allows every SAP user to log in again without any help desk support. The solution, based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform, enables employees to request a password reset on premises, remotely, or using any mobile device.

For more information about it.password manager, read our flyer or visit our AddStore. In this blog post, we will focus more closely on our own experiences in our first development project with the much-talked-about SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

What Is the SAP HANA Cloud Platform?

SAP HANA Cloud Platform (SAP HCP) is an open platform-as-a-service (PaaS), offering application services and an in-memory database. It enables businesses to rapidly develop new applications and extend existing ones in minutes. In addition, a user-experience-as-aservice (UXaaS) function is integrated into SAP HCP, further accelerating application development.

Built-In Services for Smarter Application Management

When creating the it.password manager, we used some of the built-in services of SAP HCP.

With the help of SAP Web IDE, a powerful rapid development environment, we accelerated our project. Features such as the WYSIWYG editor enabled developers and designers to control all layout changes in real time. When extending an existing SAP application, SAP Web IDE provides a framework to build the enhancements by listing all available and necessary extension points.

The mobile portfolio also played an important role in the project. It provided secure access to on-premise systems, multiple authentication mechanisms, offline synchronization, push notifications, and more.

Pros & Cons – Our Experiences

In building our first app on SAP HCP, we witnessed numerous advantages. But we also experienced the drawbacks of cloud development via PaaS. Here is a summary of the pros and cons:

Pros

• Accessibility and speed from an all-in-one cloud platform
• Automated installation, virtualization, failover, multi-tenancy, data isolation, upgrading, and patching
• Simple and intuitive tools, no training needed
• Accelerated innovation cycles – quickly transform ideas into prototypes

Cons

• Loss of control in terms of changes to the platform made by SAP
• If features are upgraded or removed, users have to find out for themselves

Our Conclusion: SAP HCP Is the Platform of the Future

Right now, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform is the in-memory technology for today’s networked, mobile, social, and data-driven world. There is no doubt that SAP will deliver new functionalities for the SAP HCP and continuously improve current applications. Based on our experience, we are convinced that SAP HCP will be the platform of the future for all developers, designers, start-ups, and enterprises that are striving to be a part of the future SAP ecosystem.

Want to learn more about our SAP HANA Cloud Platform offerings? Contact me: [email protected]

– Thomas Nørmark, Director Innovation & Technology LoB, NTT DATA Business Solutions a/s –