Some thoughts on the HANA (Small) Enterprise Cloud from an SAP Business One perspective

[richardduffy]

Now that I am an SAP Mentor I had the pleasure and privilege to be part of a pre-briefing and the announcement of the new HANA Enterprise Cloud (thanks to Mark Finnern for his ad-hoc camera work!) and it was very exciting to hear about the vision that SAP has for HANA and using it to help our customers.

You can view the replay of the session - here - http://events.sap.com/sap-hana-global-press-event/en/session/4902

It got me thinking about the applications for the HANA Enterprise Cloud (can we call it HEC for short?) that relate to SAP Business One and how our customers are using it and the possibilities for the future.

So first point, its clear that right now, this is not a solution that is designed to address the needs of a typical small enterprise and SAP Business One version for SAP HANA and our SAP Business One Analytics powered by SAP HANA  - as the FAQ states its focused on the SAP Business Suite, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA and selected partner and custom SAP HANA based applications. Get the full FAQ here - http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC-3554

But lets take a look in to what the future may hold....

The logical application for this is in 2 Tier ERP...where a Large Enterprise uses a solution like SAP Business Suite in the parent organisation and SAP Business One in their subsidiaries.

Or as is the case right now in a project I am involved in, with their distributors and other ecosystem partners.

The issue that always comes up in these projects is scalability vs capability vs deployability....solution x has what we need from a functional footprint but how do we roll it out to 100, 500, 1000 ecosystem partners across a country or across the world, how do we integrate the end to end solution and how do we manage it once its rolled out.

Enter SAP Business One version for HANA, running on the HANA Enterprise Cloud....a perfect use case in my view.

Of course it's early days, the scenario I mention is out of scope and we are all fleshing out exactly how the HEC will work (duck while branding flood my mailbox with dont call it HEC emails) but you can be sure I will be chasing this one down and as I discover more I'll share it with you.

In the mean time, if you are wondering about exactly what this 2 Tier thing is all about heres a video I put together to help explain it from an SAP Business One perspective

Please tell me what your thoughts are, do you think theres a space in the world of Big Data for small enterprises or maybe you have a view on this whole 2 Tier ERP concept...I would love to hear from you!