For all SAP customers and partners that are operating an SAP HANA 2.0 system, now is the time to migrate to SAP HANA Cloud.  Whether you manage SAP HANA in your own data-center, hosted, or in a cloud infrastructure-as-a-service environment, SAP HANA Cloud is simply the next logical step in your SAP HANA journey.

If you have deployed an SAP HANA environment for custom applications, side car data marts, analytic accelerators, or a SQL data warehouse, there has never been a better time to transition to SAP HANA Cloud. To be certain, SAP will continue to safeguard and maximize your current SAP HANA 2.0 investment. However, SAP HANA Cloud is the proven, recommended, and supported cloud-native option to move to as well as modernize and power the next generation of intelligent data applications.

“Intelligent data applications represent the next generation of self-learning and self-adapting applications that leverage built-in analytical and operational database capabilities to provide new experiences. These innovative applications take advantage of built-in algorithms for capabilities such as business functions, machine learning, graph processing, and spatial analysis. They are data-intensive by nature, requiring the ability to ingest and process data in any format from any source, in real-time as events occur, enabling process automation and ad-hoc business decision-making on both current and historical data.”

Power Intelligent Data Applications with SAP HANA Cloud

Here are some key reasons to start your modernization with SAP HANA Cloud today:

1. Cloud Native Experience

SAP HANA Cloud was designed and architected for the cloud.  Therefore, it provides cloud native qualities with the power, performance, and capabilities you expect from SAP HANA. These cloud qualities include flexible deployment options on the cloud provider of your choice as well as elasticity, scalability, resiliency, reliability, high availability, and security.

2. Leave the Operations to Us

Our expert SAP HANA Cloud operations teams supported by AI technologies provide a fully managed and optimized database-as-a-service experience. SAP HANA Cloud provides the infrastructure, software, support, and database operations within a singular service. This allows you to keep your attention on the value-add activities your organizations and customers need you to focus on. Just set-up your SAP HANA Cloud account and deploy it wherever you want, and we take care of the rest.

3. Lower Your TCO and Improve Business Value

Did you know that we’ve reduced the consumption price of SAP HANA Cloud by over 40% since we released the service 3 years ago?  When considering the total software maintenance, infrastructure, and operational costs involved, SAP HANA Cloud can provide a lower total-cost-of-ownership at the same or even better performance compared to other deployments. Meaning you can free up both valuable people resources used to manage your database systems today as well as budget for more critical strategic investments. SAP HANA Cloud also gives you the flexibility to turn on and off instances as you need them, automate administrative processes, and much more. Unlike a fixed on-premises system, you can also dynamically increase and/or decrease your overall system size and better yet even change the ratio of vCPU to memory to cost optimize for the performance you need with zero downtime. Also, there are numerous commercial models to choose from. Ranging from a no commit free-tier or trial to try before you buy, to a pay-as-you-go consumption-based service via SAP CPEA (Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement), to a full-commit SAP HANA Cloud subscription.

4. Future Proof Your Environment

There are hundreds of SAP applications and services that have already adopted SAP HANA Cloud for its numerous benefits. In addition, there are thousands of customers that have created bespoke mission critical applications on SAP HANA Cloud. The fact is that SAP HANA Cloud is the strategic database service going forward for SAP and its customers and partners. It represents the database foundation for SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform) as well as intelligent data applications and even powers SAP Datasphere for Business Data Fabric use cases. As another example, SAP HANA Cloud is the database service that SAP Integrated Business Planning uses for elastic data processing, which plans some of the world’s largest and most complex supply chains. You can rest assured that by choosing SAP HANA Cloud you are upgrading to a database service that can handle any kind of workload (transactions and/or analytics), data-type (structured, unstructured, spatial, graph, JSON), advanced analytics (predictive, intelligent machine learning, AI), data source (via replication, federation, and hybrid), breadth of data scale (30GB to multi-petabyte Data Lake), and deployment platforms (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and AliCloud). In addition to SAP HANA Cloud being integrated with the latest SAP BTP tooling, modeling tools, cockpits, automation, and AI capabilities, it’s also an open service to third-party platforms, tools, and services. This includes integrating with third-party databases and data storage via replication and data virtualization.

5. Extend your SAP Business Data to Create Intelligent Data Applications

SAP HANA Cloud plays an important role in being able to support the extension of SAP application data to create intelligent data applications. In fact, SAP HANA Cloud provides a powerful native dynamic hybrid extension “easy button” capability via a real-time replication service.  This allows for the ability to seamlessly and securely connect to any SAP HANA system under an SAP application to replicate data, objects, and calculation views in real-time to SAP HANA Cloud. You can now take non-application workloads off these underlying SAP HANA systems and transition it to SAP HANA Cloud. The SAP HANA source systems can also be deployed with SAP RISE cloud environments.  Once this SAP application data is in SAP HANA Cloud you can take advantage of its cloud native properties, scalability, elasticity, and deployment flexibility.  In addition, you can then start to extend this data with non-SAP data as well as enhance it with more advanced capabilities, such as multi-model data processing, to create the next generation of intelligent data applications.

6. Modernize with Confidence

There are numerous assets and support available to get started with transitioning to SAP HANA Cloud. From business value data points and cost estimators to help you plan your business case, to self-service tooling that automates the key database migration steps, as well as best practice guides, documentation, and tutorials. There is also a technical help desk available to assist with any migration-related questions. If you require high-touch concierge support, the SAP Database Migration Factory and SAP MaxAttention provides highly trained and experienced professional migration services. In fact, our SAP Migration Factory offers free assessments to help you get started.

So why wait? Start here to understand the steps to develop your modernization plan and begin the next chapter in your SAP HANA journey.