Why Cloud platforms are the foundation for our personalized and fully integrated cloud experience
Tue 20 Mar 2018
Here Dr Christian Michel discusses SAP’s cloud platform and its advantages.
Agile personalization and quick extension of SAP’s on prem and cloud solutions are central use cases for cloud services on the SAP Cloud Platform. Fiori Cloud, for instance, brings modern, personalized and simple web user interfaces that smoothly extend our SaaS and on prem solutions. You can find hundreds of those interactive Fiori applications in our catalogue, the Fiori App Library. Furthermore, you can find impressive use cases for SAP Cloud Platform at our customer success portal. On this portal, we collected information on innovative use cases, as for instance, mobile apps for sales people, interactive product catalogues for customers, global portals for HR departments, service ticketing solutions, complete IoT platforms, and many more.
Integration
SAP is fully dedicated to the easy integration of complex backend environments and web applications. Accordingly, the SAP Cloud Platform offers an impressive range of enterprise-ready integration abilities, called SAP Cloud Platform, Integration Services. To name a small selection, we provide ready-to-use process and data integration flows via our Integration Hub. Those flows establish smooth communication between SAP solutions, for instance, SAP Hybris, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP S/4HANA, and non-SAP solutions by Google, AWS, Microsoft, and SugarCRM. Integration also means the ability to create new web interfaces, called APIs, and to share them with a distributed developer community. Our API Management Service allows you to list, create, and monitor access to cloud applications and services via distinct web APIs. Accordingly, SAP and our strong ecosystem provide a broad range of web APIs available on our API Business Hub, an interactive catalogue for such APIs to our solutions and service. Here you can even explore, try, and interact with our APIs by entering text, uploading images or modifying API calls. You want to explore our Machine Learning API? Do it directly on this Hub, and immediately receive results within a safe sandbox environment.
Open standards
Open standards and, with this, open source, is at the core of many SAP Cloud Platform Services. We integrate a broad range of successful open technologies. To name a few, we leverage and contribute to Cloud Foundry as a versatile PaaS layer with support for many programming runtimes, for instance NodeJS, and runtime technologies, for instance Docker. Our Big Data Service offers a highly performant and optimized data processing service, based on the open source tools Hadoop and Spark. Linux is running in our Virtual Machines, and TensorFlow can be used for implementing intelligent Machine Learning driven cloud solutions. Such external and our own popular open source technologies, are the foundation of open standards and build the common ground for thousands of developers all over the world.
Mobile
Today’s business solutions cannot be thought of without having your workflows, interfaces, and processes directly and fully integrated on your mobile devices. Accordingly, we provide the SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Service. This service includes a mobile SDK for easy access to your enterprise data and allows you to create enterprise-grade apps for mobile devices, wearables, and desktops on a single development platform. You can even convert your existing Fiori Web Application into a mobile application within minutes. Furthermore, through our strong partnership with Apple we can offer the impressive SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS. With this SDK, developers can access native iOS frameworks and technologies to build incredible apps. This means that apps can take advantage of the latest interface technologies and built-in sensors to provide the context and experience that users expect. You can find great examples for such apps at SAP customers all over the world, such as B. Braun, Vestas Wind Systems, and Herfy. All of them developed native iOS application for their customers or employees, in a minimum of time, and fully integrated into the SAP Cloud Platform and with access to their backend systems. End-to-end, from backend to mobile device.
The future of cloud
2018 will be a great year for cloud computing and SAP Cloud Platform. However, the overwhelming breadth of this topic will become more and more challenging for most companies. Hundreds of new players and technologies have appeared and keep appearing. Accordingly, although we see many great new technologies like Machine Learning, Blockchain, Augmented Reality, and highly innovative cloud development technologies around containers and server-less computing, our main prediction is not about those specific technologies, but that companies need a strong partner supporting them on this transformation journey in this global jungle of innovations and hypes. We help our customers to identify their relevant use cases for cloud computing, help them to decide which technologies to apply, and how to integrate and implement them smoothly, fully integrated into complex, most often SAP based, business processes. This joint path towards innovation in 2018 is called SAP Leonardo. And our multi cloud approach and openness to open source is a perfect foundation for this continuously changing innovation environment.
