Great Cloud Platforms
Adoption of cloud computing services is growing exponentially all around the world. Companies are realizing that so much of the hard, expensive work that they used to have to do internally can now be outsourced to cloud providers, allowing the companies to focus on what it is that they do best. That’s the reason why tech research firm Gartner projects that over the next five years, the shift to the cloud is looking to be a US$1-trillion market.
Everything from running payrolls, to marketing, logistics, data analysis and much, much more is moving to the cloud, and one of the most successful uses of the cloud is the concept of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS, as it is known). What this does is enable customers to develop, run and manage their own applications without having to invest heavily in the infrastructure required in order to develop and launch a web application.
The key to creating a good product on the right platform is to win the hearts and minds of web developers so that they choose the right platform to go with. SAP, the world’s largest enterprise cloud company with over 320,000 customers and over 110 million cloud users in 190 countries is using its extensive experience and knowledge in the business space to offer the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, a remarkable service for all company sizes. This platform is already being used extensively by developers who are creating apps for their customers or their various organizations and employees.
The SAP HANA Cloud Platform enables developers to build business applications in the cloud quickly and easily.
Three features of this platform stand out:
- its ability to extend your cloud and on-premise applications to develop customized hybrid solutions,
- the awesome feature allowing you to integrate applications seamlessly and securely to synchronize data and processes across cloud, on-premise and third-party applications, as well as
- the core feature which allows you to build new enterprise-ready applications rapidly with an open standards platform that brings out the best in developers.
The Director of Group Software at the Danone Group, Ralf Steinbach, says that “with SAP HANA Cloud Platforms, we can quickly develop beautiful, user-friendly applications that are opening new opportunities to connect our customers directly to our back-end systems.”
cloud services are a rapidly expanding market, and research indicates there are over 150 PaaS offerings to choose from. Too often companies simply choose the PaaS of a cloud-service provider that they’re already working with, without exploring the offerings in-depth and with a long-term focus.
According to John Rymer of Forrester Research, there are three types of developers who make use of PaaS offerings to build apps:
- Coders, who want the ability to do it all themselves,
- devops developers who want the ability to do some coding if they need to but can also plug into some level of abstraction, and
- RapidDevs who don’t want to code at all but just to configure a task to the capabilities of the platform.
For each of these types of developers, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform can deliver, due to its flexibility, requiring fewer skills and still at a lower cost. That flexibility extends to the choices that customers are offered between selecting to use a private, managed cloud, a public pay-as-you-go model or even public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service.
In order for a platform to survive and thrive, it requires developers to regard it as the best choice for what they have to do on a daily basis: easily and quickly deploy applications that leverage a proven in-memory platform for next generation applications and analytics supported by a world-class technical team at every step of the way.
A great way to get started with SAP HANA Cloud Platform is with the user-based packages. Priced per users, they offer the flexibility to choose the package that best fits your needs. You can get started for as little as $25 / user / month, and scale as you go, adding more users or upgrading to add more resources when you need them.
Sponsored spotlight series by SAP
By Jeremy Daniel
