Today we talked with Florian Stilkerich who is leading SAP’s Cloud transformation services portfolio as part of the SAP Services Portfolio Management team.
Florian walked us through an amazing demo that he will be showing at SAPPHIRE NOW. The demo features the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) real-time capabilities, and how it is leveraged to build on-the-fly social media marketing promotions.
It is only one example of how the SAP HANA Cloud Platform can be used by organizations who either want to build extensions to their core business enterprise functionalities, or build brand new real-time applications in the cloud.
But first, what is the SAP HANA Cloud Platform?
The HANA Cloud platform (HCP) is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that enables customers and developers alike to leverage the speed of SAP HANA in the cloud, to build, extend and run applications.
It is an open, standard-based, modular PaaS offering, seamlessly integrating with SAP or third-party systems, in the cloud or on-premise. It can connect and integrate the SAP HANA platform to enable real-time business processes and analytics. It provides flexible subscription models and optional services for application, database, and infrastructure.
The SAP HANA Cloud Platform is remotely monitored via a web-based operations console and is using a standards-based development and run-time environment. It is fully combined with the SAP Store, so applications can be made available on the SAP HANA Marketplace.
Demo: doing social media marketing with Facebook
If you are one of the more than 1.3 Billion Facebook users, you certainly came across a promotion for a flight or hotel displayed on your main page. Now put yourself in the shoes of a company who wants to build such a promotional page on Facebook to advertise one of its products (holiday packages in this example) and plan follow-up marketing activities with the leads it managed to capture.
Let’s take it a step further…what about searching for promotion opportunities based on real-time flight information, building in one click a promotion page on Facebook, and automatically adding all your captured leads details to your CRM system for follow-up activities?
This is now possible with an application built by the SAP Global Delivery organization on top of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
How does it work?
You should start building your list of promotions in your ERP system: in this example, you want to offer a 10% discount on your hotel bookings. Via the flight search engine developed o HCP you can automatically identify the time and flight number you will attach your promotion to.
The HCP ability to handle unstructured data let you add a good picture to include in your promotion. Next step is to build your promotion page on Facebook. The app features a button that allows you to automatically create a dedicated Facebook page that potential customers who are subscribed to the Facebook page can like or comment.
You get a real-time promotion report to measure the effectiveness of your campaign by age groups, regions, day-time, etc… so you can adjust your campaign in real-time to generate the most impact.
All the people who like your promotion will be considered as potential leads, and their names and email addresses will be automatically added to your CRM system via HCP, allowing you to plan your follow-up activities. The Mail service integrated on HCP allows you to send an email directly from your application to the potential customers who liked the specific promotion on the Facebook page.
That’s it. All you need is the SAP HANA Cloud Platform to get started. And if you don’t have the developers in-house, you can also leverage SAP’s Global Delivery organization that can build or extend your applications for you. Plan your custom business app and get the full service and quality from SAP Custom Development.
Want to learn more? Make sure to attend Florian’s demo @SAPphire Session 13982 - Build Custom Solutions That Meet the Business Need for Speed in the Cloud
If you want to learn more about SAP’s Cloud Transformation Services go here: http://www.sap.com/services-support/svc/cloud-services-consulting.html
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