Analyzing ‘Roles and Responsibilities’ in the HANA Enterprise Cloud

[richard_hirsch]

I recently found a very detailed service description for the HANA Enterprise Cloud in which the roles and responsibilities between SAP and the customer are depicted.  This document contains over 30 pages of material with generic sections (“Service Request Management - Technical Support”, “Infrastructure Integration”,etc) to product-specific tasks (“SAP CO-PA Accelerator - Operations”, “SAP BI4.X: Monitoring and Housekeeping”,etc). There are different types of responsibilities (“SAP responsible to perform/deliver”, “SAP responsible to perform/deliver”, “customer responsible to perform/deliver, can be delegated to SAP as optional service on subscription basis”, etc).

There are a variety of interesting aspects to this document:

• There are no prices in the document - so there is no need to look for them.
• The amount of detail is impressive and shows that SAP is providing customer with a great deal of choice regarding services.
• Customers might already have access to this document but the fact that it is public is a good sign of the level of transparency associated with the HEC service.
• The level of customer involvement (ie the particular responsibilities) varies greatly between products (for example, HEC-based NetWeaver Portal customers still have many tasks for which they may be responsible). Many of these tasks, however, can also be performed by SAP on a subscription basis.
• Some tasks can’t be delegated to SAP. This is especially true for all partner-related software. Whether a third party (for example, an SI) could perform these tasks on behalf of a customer is unknown.
• This document is from SAP. Partners that also offer the HEC  will probably have a different list of roles /responsibilities.  For customers, it might be useful to compare these documents.
• There are some HEC-based applications (for example, SAP Fraud Management, SAP Fraud Management for Public Sector, SAP Fraud Management for Insurance, SAP Customer Value Intelligence, SAP Audience Discovery & Targeting) which are not listed in this document. These are more cutting-edge applications based on HANA and which may be SaaS in nature.