SAP ups the ante for enterprise innovation with updates to its Platform-as-a-Service

LAS VEGAS — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced updates to SAP HANA Cloud Platform, including a range of new capabilities and features to power digital transformation across the enterprise.

From Citizen Developers to Hard-Core Coders, SAP HANA Cloud Platform Enables Leading-Edge Apps With New Tools for Development

Innovations comprise a personal edition of SAP Web IDE for offline application development with planned automatic synchronization upon connection to the cloud, and a software development kit (SDK) for this integrated development environment (IDE) that supports quick creation of new application templates as well as integration of partner tools into SAP Web IDE. Additionally, open sourcing of templates for SAP HANA Cloud Platform, portal service, are now available to enable community-based content and experiences. This announcement was made at the SAP TechEd conference taking place September 19–23 in Las Vegas.

“The latest SAP HANA Cloud Platform updates make our platform-as-a-service innovation platform even more attractive for our customers and partners, giving them the speed and scale to develop enterprise applications and deliver the best user experiences possible,” said Bjoern Goerke, executive VP and corporate officer, SAP. “This will help them accelerate digital transformation by quickly and easily delivering new applications and services in the cloud, while also breathing new life into on-premise applications.”

Enabling Partners to Deliver the Right Development Environment to Customers

SAP Web IDE delivers a unified development experience across enterprise applications, greatly accelerating the creation of new SAP Fiori and Internet of Things apps, and allowing easy extension of SAP Fiori apps in the cloud and on premise. Updates include the following:

• SAP Web IDE gives SAP application developers the ability to develop, test and monitor many more enterprise applications in an optimal development environment.
• The SDK for SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP Web IDE, empowers partners to tailor SAP Web IDE to meet the needs of their customers and integrate complementary software solutions directly into SAP Web IDE.
• SAP Web IDE provides additional innovation to SAP partners and customers as a single development environment from SAP and its partners.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), an SAP partner, already offers an extended software toolkit for end-to-end testing and monitoring of SAP Fiori and SAP HANA apps. HPE continues to build upon its partnership by exploring additional ways to integrate its award-winning cloud-based application delivery solutions such as StormRunner into SAP Web IDE. The companies plan to provide solutions that will deliver enterprise-scale, multidevice functional, performance and security testing offerings optimized for SAP software. The partnership aims to continue to enable customers to realize cost savings and innovation by bringing the worlds of development and testing closer together.

“Business applications in the cloud and the Internet of Things can lead to new revenue streams and opportunities, but also exponentially increasing demands on application quality while release times are shrinking,” said Adi Kavaler, ADM global VP of products and strategy, HPE. “With limited time to develop and test in sequence, we’re delighted to partner with SAP to bring together the best of both worlds in one integrated development environment — and witness the new apps that our joint customers will create.”

Extending SAP Web IDE Delivery Options With Offline Development

The personal edition of SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP Web IDE, is a complementary integrated development environment to SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP Web IDE. The personal edition:

• Can be installed on a personal workstation for offline development by a single developer, with seamless integration to other SAP HANA Cloud Platform capabilities
• Offers flexibility for developers to develop from anywhere, even when disconnected from the Internet, and then resume the work on the cloud after a brief sync
• Can be used for test and evaluation or for productive offline development for customers with a paid subscription to SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP Web IDE

Ruralco Holdings Limited, a diversified agribusiness group operating over 500 retail outlets across Australia, implemented SAP HANA Cloud Platform to improve its inventory management process. “SAP HANA Cloud platform allows live transfer of data between the SAP Fiori app and SAP back-end systems,” said Tom Hansen, chief information officer, Ruralco Holdings. “SAP HANA Cloud Platform will help build our user experience and mobile strategy by accelerating infrastructure setup, design and development of SAP Fiori apps and help us empower farmers, giving them the ability to make better decisions and improve their operations.”

Enhancing the End User’s Experience With SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Portal Service

SAP HANA Cloud Platform, portal service, provides a multichannel, role-based, personalized entry point bringing together cloud and on-premise business processes and user interfaces. Updates include the following:

• Customers can now kick off their cloud journey with a unique hybrid cloud approach, placing the user experience (UX) in the cloud while keeping critical enterprise data and processes in the data center to prevent any sensitive data from leaving the corporate network.
• The portal service has been expanded to an open source model, where SAP contributes cloud portal content such as apps and site templates to the open source community via GitHub, empowering the SAP community to deliver amazing new user experiences for the enterprise as more and more content is contributed by the community and partners.
• The portal service with the SAP Fiori launchpad now follows the SAP Fiori 2.0 UX with the new Belize design theme.

Enriching Design and Prototyping to Make App Creation More Collaborative With Build

Recently announced by SAP, Build is an open source cloud-based prototyping and user research tool from SAP and a key element of the user experience as a service on SAP HANA Cloud Platform. It makes development possible for a greater number of people by helping business analysts and other nontechnical users to quickly and iteratively develop a prototype, collect user feedback, and leverage a gallery of ready-to-go templates. Build accelerates app development by transitioning the prototype into a working SAP Fiori app using SAP Web IDE, which helps roll out applications efficiently and quickly that end users want to use — because they helped build them.