Business leaders, IT departments, and developers are pressured to innovate faster, constantly adapt, and efficiently manage IT investments. To meet these demands, they are increasingly taking advantage of emerging hyperscale computing architectures, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, and cloud solutions such as SAP Cloud Platform — a powerful solution that intelligently connects people, things, and businesses during all phases of development, integration, and operations. But at the beginning of a project, it’s hard for IT and business leaders to know exactly what they will need.
In the face of this uncertainty, IT strategies are moving toward flexible cost models that make smaller software modules quickly available and scalable to meet the needs of the moment. To simplify the cloud-engagement experience for customers, SAP announced in early 2018 that a new consumption-based commercial model for SAP Cloud Platform would be available at cloudplatform.sap.com.1 This model provides customers with the simplicity, agility, and flexibility to kickstart and deploy a comprehensive cloud platform environment to run their businesses — at the scale and pace that works for them.
SAP sought to simplify the customer engagement experience to provide more choices to customers in how they integrate, extend, and innovate their business applications. The goal is to create a robust, easy-to-use, and unified digital customer experience for discovering and consuming cloud-based technical and business services from SAP. Since rolling out the consumption-based commercial model for SAP Cloud Platform, SAP has made many strides — 40+ countries now have access to it, and more are on the horizon as businesses look to reap the benefits of this innovative offering.2
A New Way to Explore Cloud Services
Today, SAP can just sell one material number and grant the customer access to all eligible SAP Cloud Platform services. The consumption-based commercial model allows flexible and metered use of SAP Cloud Platform services in a self-service environment. Customers now have the full flexibility to consume what they need when they need it, spin a database up or down, and use or not use services. This delivers tremendous flexibility and investment security.
With the ability to procure and quickly ramp up innovative services, monitor consumption, and deprovision services when needed, SAP is giving customers a cost-effective way to implement SAP offerings into their business. Simplifying the procurement phase lets managers work more closely with their teams to focus on innovation, rather than getting hung up in the administrative overhead.
Jumpstart a Project with Use-Case Scenarios
Based on a simple contracting model and transparency with consumption levels, customers can use cloudplatform.sap.com as their one-stop shop for all their development needs. There they can discover product pages, scenarios, and use cases that outline how to start a project, showing the key components required, along with a pricing estimator (see Figure 1).
SAP Cloud Platform can help organizations solve key business challenges and add new value to the enterprise (see Figure 2). Some examples of use cases available include:
- SAP Cloud Platform mobile service for development and operations effectively mobilizes field workers.3 Many workers across industries must complete tasks in the field each day with limited or no connectivity. This makes it challenging to track tasks like new system installations or field maintenance work. The SAP Cloud Platform mobile service for development and operations equips employees with the tools they need to access information from anywhere, regardless of connectivity.
- Businesses can also integrate SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Business Suite to automate employee onboarding processes.4 Significant investment is put into recruitment and the process for onboarding new talent is not a one-size-fits-all scenario. SAP Cloud Platform Workflow helps automate the onboarding process, aiding HR and hiring managers in reducing confusion and the time it takes to get new employees up and running. For example, through SAP Cloud Platform Business Rules, SAP Cloud Platform Workflow can identify any IT equipment a new hire may need and, once approved, can trigger a purchase requisition for that employee.
- To gain competitive advantages and insights, businesses can harness the power of social media intelligence.5 Customers can employ SAP’s integration package offering, which runs on SAP Cloud Platform Integration, to retrieve the results of social media data queries directly from the social channels. From there, they can load the data into SAP Marketing Cloud and analyze customer conversations, gaining new understanding of customer sentiments and powerful insights on how to better serve their target audiences.
Full Usage Transparency
Once customers identify requirements for a project, this can then be shared with the SAP project and sales teams, who work with customers to engage with the SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement and to get access to the SAP Cloud Platform cockpit to activate consumable services. Developers can then explore, build proof-of-concepts, and expand existing cloud applications with the ability to switch services on and off as they need. Additionally, they can monitor consumption of the services and their remaining cloud credits. The ability to review monthly balance statements and invoices gives customers further control over their usage, letting them know if they need to add to their cloud credit balance or pay any overages.
Through cloud credits, SAP is looking to make its offerings more accessible on a global level, enabling customers to easily acquire, use, and monitor credits to activate SAP Cloud Platform services as needed. Letting customers choose the services they want based on their unique business needs provides transparency into the overall usage of these services and helps them access cloud services they may not have been able to before.
What’s on the Horizon
In February 2018, the consumption-based SAP Cloud Platform commercial model was announced for the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, and UAE. The focus was on making it easier for customers to build and extend innovative solutions with SAP Cloud Platform’s growing portfolio of services. At SAPPHIRE NOW in June 2018, SAP announced the launch of this model in many more APJ, EMEA, and MEE countries, bringing this simple, flexible, and agile model to an international scale.
Timed with the SAP TechEd events in October 2018, SAP is preparing to roll out the consumption-based commercial model in additional countries, including in Latin America, to continue rounding out SAP’s global picture. In addition, SAP will selectively roll out the offering in smaller countries throughout 2018 to provide more comprehensive coverage of different regions. SAP is also continuing the release of additional consumption services, which will become available to customers as part of the SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement, providing an even broader set of capabilities for extending SAP cloud solutions and developing customer solutions.
To meet growing demands for agile innovations, SAP is dedicated to providing new options and expanding solutions for customers. SAP continues to work toward expanding the geographical presence of the consumption-based commercial model and bringing rich experiences to customers through a unified digital platform.
Drive Innovation
As SAP continues to make this consumption-based model more broadly available, the company has experienced strong interest from its installed base, as well as existing and new SAP Cloud Platform customers, who want to engage via this new model to directly solve their business needs. In today’s business environment, flexibility and agility are critical to achieving innovation. SAP is determined to help customers drive that innovation, allowing them to quickly evaluate, purchase, and deploy SAP Cloud Platform services at scale when they need them. For more information, visit cloudplatform.sap.com.
1 See https://news.sap.com/2018/02/sap-cloud-platform-simplifies-app-development-and-accelerates-customer-innovation. [back]
2 For pricing details, see https://cloudplatform.sap.com/pricing.html. [back]
3 See https://cloudplatform.sap.com/scenarios/usecases/mobile-hybrid.html. [back]
4 See https://cloudplatform.sap.com/scenarios/usecases/workflow.html. [back]
5 See https://cloudplatform.sap.com/scenarios/usecases/sentiment-analysis.html. [back]
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