REPORT: OFFERING OVERVIEW
SAP Cloud Platform: A New Standard for a SaaS Vendor’s PaaS SAP Cloud Platform Enables Enterprises to Build
Next-Generation Applications with a Business
Application’s DNA
Holger Mueller Vice President and Principal AnalystContent Editors: R “Ray” Wang Copy Editor: Maria ShaoLayout Editor: Aubrey Coggins
Produced exclusively for Constellation Research clients
June 13, 2017
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
KE Y DIFFERENTIATORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
ORGANIZ ATIONAL RE VIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
RECOMMENDED SCENARIOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
ENDNOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
ANALYST BIO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
ABOUT CONSTELL ATION RESE ARCH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
© 2016 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 3
E X ECU TIV E SU MM ARY
Founded in 1972, SAP is now in its fifth decade of
operation. No other application vendor has been as
successful since the client-server age. With SAP’s former
product R/3 becoming the de facto gold standard for
enterprise software and the prominence of business
reengineering, SAP became the leader for business
software in the second half of the 1990’s. SAP offered the
most integrated platform for reengineering a company’s
business processes in the internet age.
In the 21st century, SAP remains the leader in business
applications, with a wide product portfolio that goes
beyond the traditional Enterprise Resources Planning
(ERP) space. Its products include cloud-based Human
Capital Management (HCM) solutions, the world’s most-
used procurement solution (Ariba) and travel planning and
support (Concur). SAP has launched S/4HANA, its next-
generation business application that’s designed to support
the new business models, along with new products - most
prominently SAP HANA, an in-memory database. SAP
has expanded beyond the application space and offers
competitive products in the platform market with the SAP
HANA database and the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
product, SAP Cloud Platform (CP).
SAP SE
· Headquarters: Walldorf, Germany
· Founded: 1972
· Type: Publicly traded, NYSE: SAP
SE (ADR)
· 2016 Revenue: E22.1 billion
(IFRS)
· No. Employees: 84,183 (Q4 2016)
· Website: http://sap.com
· Twitter: @SAP
Business Themes
Matrix Commerce
Data to Decisions
Future of Work
Digital Marketing &
Sales Effectiveness
Technology Optimization
Next-Gen Customer
Experience
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 4
In 2010, SAP debuted its in-memory
database, SAP HANA, which offers a unique,
differentiated strategy among enterprise
application vendors. SAP is the only vendor
that is fully betting on in-memory technology,
launching its new enterprise application suite,
S/4HANA in early 2015, running exclusively on
SAP HANA. SAP has more recently launched
the next generation of its data warehouse, SAP
BW, as BW/4HANA. And most recently, at the
Barcelona edition of its TechEd conference,
SAP unveiled SAP HANA 2, the next
generation of the SAP HANA platform itself.
On the PaaS side, SAP originally launched SAP
NetWeaver Cloud as part of the SAP HANA
cloud portfolio in the fall of 2012. In spring
2013, at its SapphireNow user conference in
Orlando, SAP renamed the product SAP HANA
Cloud Platform (HCP) when HCP became the
formal foundation of all SAP cloud products.
At Mobile Word Congress 2017, SAP renamed
its HCP product SAP Cloud Platform (CP).
Today, SAP CP has over 7,000 customers and
more than 600 partners using the product.
At SapphireNow 2017, SAP announced SAP
Leonardo, a digital transformation product
suite that uses SAP CP as its platform.
This report focuses on SAP Cloud
Platform, providing a detailed look at its
differentiating traits.
KE Y DIFFERENTIATORS
SAP CP is a platform as a service (PaaS)
product that enables enterprises to extend and
integrate SAP applications as well as build new
standalone, next-generation applications. The
platform (see Figure 1) sets itself apart with
five differentiators:
1. Brings unrivaled business application
DNA. SAP has been a leading vendor, if
not the leader, of the business application
market over the last five decades. The
organizational DNA around business
applications is a key design point for SAP
CP, which includes more than 60 services to
build enterprise-grade applications, and in
effect, is the platform on which SAP builds
new applications (such as SAP Internet
of Things) and new capabilities (such as
SAP SuccessFactors’ new bias elimination
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 5
capabilities based on SAP Machine Learning)
and enables extension and integration
capabilities that are required for business
applications. Given that background, it is
not surprising that SAP CP is also
well-positioned to build standalone, new
business applications.
2. Provides multi-cloud and hybrid cloud
deployment options. SAP CP is built on top
of Cloud Foundry, the current leading open
source PaaS platform, based on enterprise
and software vendor adoption. Cloud
Foundry allows SAP and SAP customers to
use popular programming languages but
also to deploy applications both on popular
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms
as well as potentially also on premises. A
number of technology vendors are using
Cloud Foundry, but SAP is the only business
application vendor using Cloud Foundry as a
foundation for its PaaS.
3. Takes on an open source “true north”
strategy. At SapphireNow 2017, SAP Board
Member Bernd Leukert made the point
that being open and using open source
technology have become best practices
for the whole industry and SAP. This marks
a fundamental strategy change for SAP,
which less than five years ago was not
adopting open source at all. This strategy
Figure 1. SAP Cloud Platform: Five Key Differentiators
Source: Constellation Research
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 6
change allows SAP and its customers to
gain innovation and community synergies
that characterize an open-source project to
its fullest. SAP CP has been one of the SAP
products at the forefront of the move to
open source.
4. Seeks developer-friendly approach. A
PaaS without developer adoption is a dead
PaaS. SAP CP, with its Cloud Foundry
foundation, its embrace of open source
and its role as the platform underpinning
SAP Leonardo, makes SAP CP an attractive
platform for enterprise developers as well
as citizen developers. With the support
of seven modern languages, container
cross-platform portability, SAP CP allows a
developer to be productive in a brief time,
while avoiding the vendor lock-in often seen
with Rapid Application Development (RAD)
platforms. The multi-cloud, hybrid cloud
and on-premises deployments increase
the commercial viability of SAP CP skills, as
applications built on the SAP CP platform
can be broadly used and also build on CP
services as well as platform-specific services.
5. Serves SAP-centered enterprises as well
as enterprises beyond the SAP ecosystem.
Many of the SAP CP architecture and design
capabilities cater very well to the needs
of enterprises building next-generation
capabilities. Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud
and on-premises deployment choices are
what has propelled Cloud Foundry to be
the leader in PaaS. Using Cloud Foundry
capabilities and tying those together
with the requirements of SAP business
applications make SAP CP a must-know
and must-have tool for SAP-centered
enterprises. Design points and qualities
of SAP CP make the platform a general-
purpose PaaS product to be considered by
all enterprises for their next-generation
application needs.
ORG A NIZ ATIO N A L RE VIE W
Management Team
When Jim Hagemann Snabe stepped down
as SAP Co-CEO in 2014 to join the SAP
Supervisory Board, Bill McDermott became
the first solo CEO of SAP since Henning
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 7
Kagermann. On a very small executive
leadership team of only eight members, all
product development responsibility falls
to Bernd Leukert, an SAP veteran of more
than 20 years with a long history of product
development positions on a variety of SAP
products. Leukert has repeatedly stressed
the importance of platforms in SAP products,
so Constellation sees him as a key executive
sponsor for SAP CP. In April 2017, SAP
also appointed a CTO, Bjorn Goerke, who
previously led the SAP CP efforts in SAP’s R&D
organizations, further strengthening the key
role that SAP CP plays for SAP customers as
well as SAP.
Constellation’s Analysis: SAP has an
experienced and talented executive team that
has shown it can steer through challenges.
Thanks to the vision of Chairman Hasso
Plattner to have the vendor embark on in-
memory computing more than 10 years ago,
SAP today has the largest suite of pure and
in-memory-only enterprise applications. As
a matter of fact, the latest SAP enterprise
automation suite, S/4HANA, is only available
in-memory on HANA. And HANA has become
an application platform enabling both native
development as well as SAP Cloud Platform
(CP). While SAP has successfully acquired
many cloud assets and customers, along
with creating new cloud assets, its toughest
challenge will be the successful migration of
the core customer base to S/4HANA. At the
recent user conference, SapphireNOW, SAP
unveiled SAP Leonardo, its digital innovation
offering that also runs on SAP CP.
Partnerships and Alliances
Partnerships are vital in the enterprise
software space since no single company can
build everything enterprises need. SAP has
over 15,000 partners. Constellation will only
cover a few of the most relevant, important
and recent ones with a focus on SAP CP:
• Software partners: SAP partners with a
number of ISVs. The following ones are
key partnerships for the success of SAP
CP, helping the offering’s functionality
and widening its deployment options: (in
alphabetical order) Adobe, Akamai, Apigee
(now Google), Bosch CF management
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 8
tools, CloudFoundry, Here, MongoDB
and OpenStack.
• IaaS partners: SAP has signed several key
IaaS partnerships recently, starting with
IBM, then Microsoft, and most recently
AWS. IaaS partnerships are important for
SAP customers as they reduce the overall
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of an SAP
solution, allowing companies to move
capital expenditures (CAPEX) to operating
expenses (OPEX). A secondary benefit for
SAP customers is that SAP itself doesn’t
have to spend CAPEX on, for example,
CP infrastructure but can invest these
resources elsewhere, such as in R&D. Today,
SAP partners with (in alphabetical order)
Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform and
Microsoft Azure.
• Services partners: There is no established
professional services company that is
not an SAP partner. What matters for
CP adoption is that practically all these
partners are getting CP trained and
certified, ensuring that joint SAP and
partner customers receive consistent and
high quality service. Large professional
services companies have already embraced
SAP CP for rapid prototyping and proof of
concept (POC) work. As such, SAP CP gives
these companies also the strategic option
to transform themselves from a services
to a product (ISV) company. Examples are
(in alphabetical order) Accenture, Atos,
Capgemini, Deloitte, EY, HCL, Infosys,
and Wipro.
• ISV partners: Independent software
vendors (ISVs) have made the decision
to make SAP CP their PaaS platform.
Notable examples are (in alphabetical
order) Accenture (HCM Software), Arteria,
Blueboot, Innovapptive, Keytree, NGA HR
and Sodales. The marketplace that these
ISVS can use, SAP App Center, showcases
well over 1,000 apps.
Constellation’s Analysis: Partnerships are
crucial in the enterprise software space and
vendors need to be able to attract, form and
nurture partnerships. SAP has shown that
it can attract partners to form a veritable
ecosystem around SAP CP. With over 7,100
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 9
SAP CP customers, SAP has shown enough
customer adoption to attract over 650
partners building solutions on top of SAP CP,
impressive numbers for a relatively
new platform.
Competitive Positioning
Despite the competition from newer “born on
the web” competitors, SAP has not only been
able to keep its lead as the largest enterprise
application vendor but even expanded its
leadership in some markets - both from
functional and geographical perspectives.
SAP has achieved this by “taking the long
march” or developing products internally -
most prominently SAP’s in-memory database,
SAP HANA, SAP’s private cloud offering
HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC), SAP’s PaaS
offering, SAP Cloud Platform (CP) and its new
enterprise suite with S/4HANA.
At SapphireNow 2017, SAP announced its
digital innovation platform, Leonardo, which
supports analytics, big data, blockchain, IoT
and Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence
(ML/AI) capabilities. Remarkably, in a change
from previous direction, the more recent
offerings of CP and Leonardo take more
advantage of, or even fully run on top of, open
source-based products and platforms.
Constellation’s Analysis: Enterprise software
vendors do not remain leaders over multiple
decades when they don’t demonstrate that
they can successfully adopt new trends and
capabilities. In SAP’s case, the embrace of open
source capabilities is a strong departure from
its previous technology and platform strategy
that was strongly predicated on building and
controlling products and technology in house.
SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA are examples
of that previous era. But the rise of open
source platforms, which has effectively been
embraced by all major enterprise software
vendors, wasn’t left unnoticed at SAP. More
specifically, SAP Hybris adopted Cloud
Foundry as the base of its next-generation
offering, providing both viability and proof
points to the rest of SAP, which adopted
Cloud Foundry formally in spring 2016 as its
underlying PaaS technology. Embracing and
exploiting open source makes SAP a more
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 10
viable vendor for its customers and prospects
as well as a more attractive platform to
enterprise developers, which is crucial for any
platform’s adoption.
Market Positioning
SAP has a unique market position with SAP CP.
It is the only enterprise application software
vendor of scale that has fully committed to
Cloud Foundry. All other major competitors to
SAP elected to build their own PaaS offerings,
requiring them to commit attention and R&D
budget to key PaaS capabilities, such as multi-
cloud support. This should allow SAP to adopt
new open source technologies in the area of
ML/AI faster than its competitors, for example.
SAP’s decision to make SAP CP the platform
that powers SAP Leonardo is a key sign for
enterprise CxOs that SAP CP is here to stay.
But for SAP CP to become a full success,
it needs to continue being adopted across
the wide collection of SAP solutions - from
complementing S/4HANA and being the
platform underpinning SAP Leonardo to next-
generation applications built as standalone
projects. SAP CP will have to see uptake
across the Ariba, Fieldglass, Concur, Hybris
and SuccessFactors product portfolios. CP
will have to integrate these newer and older
products and offer a competitive platform
for all of them to show the leverage SAP
customers expect.
Constellation’s Analysis: With the positive
experience of the Hybris team with Cloud
Foundry, it was possible for SAP to embrace
the Cloud Foundry platform beyond the Hybris
scope. The widespread adoption of CP is a
huge challenge ahead but also the prize for
SAP customers. With more uptake, support
and platform abilities in CP, customers will
have to use CP more broadly. And with Cloud
Foundry, SAP has bet on the best and most
popular PaaS platform out there, making it an
easy-to-accept platform choice for customers.
Compared to its key competitors, SAP has
chosen an open source-based platform future,
which helps SAP to disrupt itself. One offering
that is showcasing this already is SAP Internet
of Things, which runs on CP and was the
proof point and eye opener for SAP Leonardo,
showing that an open and open source-
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 11
based approach is the best platform and
implementation approach in the age of digital
transformation.
Key SAP Cloud Platform Capabilities
Multi-Cloud Support
The foundation of SAP CP is Cloud Foundry,
which has become the leading PaaS platform
for enterprises building next-generation
applications. At the heart of the Cloud Foundry
product success lies its multi-cloud capabilities
that give customers the option to deploy
applications across a number of different
IaaS environments.
SAP CP takes advantage of these platform
capabilities and gives customer IaaS platform
choice. Multi-cloud capabilities rank high on
enterprises’ PaaS requirements list, as decision
makers want to avoid lock-in with vendors.
Even though it is not always clear if enterprises
will be able to take advantage of multi-cloud
over the lifecycle of their app deployments,
they still don’t want to make an early decision
that limits choices in the future.
With SAP CP, enterprises can deploy solutions
on the following platforms:
• Amazon AWS
• Google Cloud Platform
• Microsoft Azure
• SAP Cloud
As the list shows, not only do enterprises get
options on the public cloud IaaS side, but they
can also choose to deploy in SAP’s cloud with
services that make this more of a managed
cloud offering (see Figure 2).
Constellation’s Analysis: SAP offers the most
flexible deployment options among enterprise
application vendors, giving customers choices
for where they deploy their next-generation
applications built on SAP CP. Beyond the
avoidance of lock-in, multi-cloud capability
is also important for CxOs today because
of data residency and privacy regulations,
patchwork IaaS vendor coverage by country
and performance considerations.
Even though information travels at the speed
of light in networks, it still takes the light
longer when the server is farther away from
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 12
the customer. Moreover, being able to deploy
solutions across public clouds will get even
more important as enterprise automation
moves to the public cloud. With that shift,
flexible cloud deployment enables a better
user experience in terms of performance.
Lastly, SAP can focus more if its capital
expenditures toward products, ideally allowing
higher R&D spending on its PaaS and
SaaS products.
SAP Leonardo Supports Emerging Technology
for Innovative Apps
At Sapphire 2017, SAP launched SAP Leonardo,
a group of modern technologies that are key
ingredients for next-generation applications.
Key technologies are big data, blockchain,
insight-to-action powering analytics, Internet
of Things (IoT) and Machine Learning. All of
them are running on SAP CP, making it the
de facto platform underlying Leonardo. SAP
Leonardo implementations will be shaped by
Figure 2. SAP Cloud Platform and Multi-Cloud Options and Benefits
Source: SAP
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 13
design thinking, coupled with user experience
(UX) prototyping, allowing enterprises to build
their innovative and differentiating next-
generation applications on top of SAP CP (see
Figure 3). Customers of SAP CP, including
Karma Automotive and C&J Energy, make the
rapid prototyping capability of CP a key reason
for selecting the PaaS product.
Enterprises have already built next-generation
applications with the SAP CP platform,
including IoT use cases such as MAPAL,
Siemens with its MindSphere offering as well
as Bosch. SAP itself has used Machine Learning
in new next-generation applications for brand
impact and invoice matching.
Constellation’s Analysis: With digital
disruption often knocking on the door of
enterprises, digital transformation capabilities
become a survival skill. Fast action is critical
in these situations, and in most cases for
enterprises, the action boils down to building
the right applications more quickly than
Figure 3. How SAP Cloud Platform Fits on the Overall SAP Product Landscape
Source: SAP
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 14
competitors. SAP CP not only enables and
runs the design thinking implementations
that are behind SAP Leonardo, but it also
powers the SAP UX Build tools that allow for
rapid prototyping. This makes SAP CP the
key platform product/PaaS product for SAP-
centric enterprises going forward.
It’s equally good to see that SAP’s deep
methodology-centric and high-quality
applications that yield development tools are
now able to support rapid prototyping as well
as agile and design thinking processes on top
of SAP CP. This is a key development for SAP
customers who won’t have to look beyond SAP
for third-party tools and platforms to provide
them the necessary development speed and
productivity. This will make enterprises more
productive building applications, a key benefit
in an age when “software is eating the world.”
Ecosystem Play Attracts Developers
and Partners
SAP realizes that it needs to enlist developers
and partners to use SAP CP for all three of
its usage scenarios – integration, extension
and building of brand new, sometimes even
standalone, applications. To get developers and
partners on board, SAP has taken key steps
around SAP CP:
• SAP API Business Hub: Partners and
developers can use the SAP API Business
Hub for information and specific
development purposes. It supports not only
the download but also lifecycle management
aspects for APIs, integration flows and apps.
SAP has added new APIs to the hub from
SAP S/4HANA, SAP Hybris, SAP Ariba as
well as several additional SAP and third-
party application integration flows.
• SAP App Center: The central digital
marketplace for SAP is SAP App Center,
which offers access to more than 1,000
enterprise-ready applications from at
least 650 SAP CP partners (see Figure 4).
This brings an end to multiple sprawling
marketplaces. SAP has made it easy for
customers to try an application before they
buy it, allowing provision of a potential
new application in the cloud first, with no
additional work required for the production
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 15
system. Moreover, trials are supported
with auto-provisioning to SAP CP. Also,
the support of subscription management
makes it easier to consume applications.
Lastly, it would not be an SAP product if SAP
did not offer enterprise-grade purchasing
support, including support for multicurrency
purchase orders and credit cards.
Constellation’s Analysis: While SAP
understands partners well and has had a
track record as a partner ecosystem builder
for more than three decades, its partnerships
were always complementary and well-defined,
often along physically tangible lines such as
hardware partnerships. A software ecosystem
is different, though, because it needs to attract
interest in the benefits of integrating, selling
and/or servicing the software. This can and
Figure 4. Screenshot of SAP App Center
Source: SAP
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 16
should lead to co-opetition with some partners.
But as long as SAP welcomes SaaS partners
and treats them as equals in the marketplace,
Constellation foresees no major challenges
in the area of co-opetition. What SAP has
understood well is that opening the SAP user
ecosystem as a potential marketplace for
partners and developers is key for a platform’s
success. The lingua franca of integration
these days are APIs, and SAP is making the
transparency, management, download and
lifecycle management of its software easier
for ecosystem partners – a key move. Having
a single marketplace for partner offerings -
the SAP App Center - is an important step to
ensure a rich and thriving ecosystem.
Partners build for marketplaces when there
are customers using the marketplaces. In
addition, customers are attracted by ease
of use. The ability of the SAP App Center
to support noninvasive “try before buy”
processes is certainly an attraction for
customers as well as the auto provisioning
of trial or purchased apps to SAP CP. Making
apps commerce as frictionless as possible helps
digital marketplaces succeed and SAP has
taken key steps toward that success with its
SAP App Center announcements in May 2017.
Customer References
At its 2017 user conference, SAP shared the
following customer stories for SAP CP:
• IoT as a Next-Gen App: SAP IoT has been
building its offering on top of SAP CP for
more than a year, so not surprisingly, most
customer stories came from the IoT use
case. Siemens MindSphere uses SAP CP
to create the Siemens IoT platform for
applications in manufacturing and for
industry customers. Similarly, MAPAL and
SAP have partnered to create a platform
to complete the lifecycle management for
C-parts. MAPAL also uses the iOS SDK that
is part of SAP CP to run the platform use
cases on Apple devices. And finally, Bosch
uses SAP CP to enable truck drivers to
track work and rest times as well as to
connect drivers with their cargo pickup and
delivery locations.
© 2016 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 17
• Transform the Digital Enterprise: SAP shared internally
built applications for SAP Brand Impact, an application
that analyzes brand exposure in the media by using
vision techniques. Another use case is SAP Ticketing,
a service desk management application that uses SAP
Leonardo Machine Learning to group, assign and route
service tickets appropriately.
• Multi-Cloud Support: SAP CP allows SAP HANA
XS Advanced apps to run both in the cloud and on
premises (or where the HANA system is located). Karma
Automotive uses SAP CP to merge application assets
that operate both on-premises and in the cloud, creating
a true hybrid operation that uses applications in the
locations where they work best.
Constellation’s Analysis: It is still early days for SAP CP,
with analytics and IoT being the earliest adopters. It is good
to see that SAP uses SAP CP to build its next-generation
applications, such as SAP Brand Impact and SAP Ticketing.
And finally, highlighting Karma Automotive as an early
example of multi-cloud deployment is a confidence-building
sign for customers.
Constellation expects SAP CP to become very popular
quickly, and SAP should be able to showcase more
customer stories soon. Early customer showcases will be
Typical Customer Profile
· Revenue: At least $100 million
a year
· Number of employees: More
than 1,000
· Geography: Global
· Industries: Can be used by
most industries
· Roles: Chief Information Officer,
Chief Technology Officer, Chief
Revenue Officer, Chief Customer
Officer, Chief Service Officer, Chief
HR Officer, Chief People Officer
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 18
critical. The fact that SAP is building its own
applications on SAP CP and using it as the
integration platform is a validation point for
customers, but by itself is not enough to give
CxOs the confidence to build their enterprises’
next-generation applications on SAP CP. SAP
will have to overcome the adoption confidence
factor with more customer showcases. The
needs of ISVs and enterprises overlap but are
also substantially different, with the former
most prominently having to support multiple
customers and products, the latter mostly
only having to run a single next generation
application.
RECO MMEND ED S CEN ARIOS
Constellation sees several use cases where
enterprises would turn to SAP CP to solve their
automation needs. SAP’s business application
DNA will make customers gravitate toward
specific, defined business application use
cases – not necessarily all-purpose, generic
applications. It’s important to note, though,
that SAP CP is a PaaS platform that does allow
for building all-purpose, generic applications.
Constellation sees a compelling case for SAP
CP in the following use cases (see Figure 5):
1. Revolutionizing Intra-Enterprise Functions.
Enterprises need to reinvent how they
operate internally. This will require
them to transition from being traditional
organizations using stovepipe applications
to agile organizations that can quickly
implement new best practices.
2. Digitizing Value Chains. Enterprises
pursuing digital transformation need to
capitalize on opportunities presented by the
supply and sales value chains. Traditional
applications lack the best practices of the
21st century that disrupt and operate these
value chains.
3. Orchestrating Things. IoT is a fast-growing
application market with expectations of
billions of things to be connected soon.
Managing things efficiently and solving the
thing-to-human interface is key for success
under this scenario.
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 19
4. Using Data as a Service (DaaS). Enterprises
possess and create millions of real-world
data points, which they have to process,
possibly monetize, benchmark and exchange
as part of a DaaS strategy.
SAP’s business application DNA, coupled with
its acumen about enterprises, makes SAP CP
a platform that companies should take note
of. For customers using SAP SaaS and other
applications, SAP CP becomes very quickly
the de facto tool of choice for any extension,
integration and stand-alone application work
that they need or want to undertake. The
platform’s synergies with SAP as a product
vendor make this choice compelling, and for
most enterprises, easy to make.
Figure 5. Constellation’s Seven Universal Next-Gen Apps Use Cases
Source: Constellation Research
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 20
ENDNOTES
1 “SAP cloud plans get less cloudy”, Holger Mueller blog, Enterprise Software Musings, May 11, 2013, SAP Cloud plans get less cloudy, http://enswmu.blogspot.de/2013/05/saps-cloud-plans-get-less-cloudy.html.
2 “HANA Cloud Platform - Revisited - Improvements ahead and turning into a real PaaS”, Holger Mueller blog, Enterprise Software Musings, September 16, 2014, HANA Cloud Platform - Revisited - Improvements ahead and turning into a real PaaS, https://www.constellationr.com/blog-news/hana-cloud-platform-revisited-improvements-ahead-and-turning-real-paas.
3 “News Analysis – SAP Commits to CloudFoundry and OpenStack – Key steps, but what is the direction?”, Holger Mueller blog, Enterprise Software Musings, July 23, 2014, https://www.constellationr.com/blog-news/news-analysis-sap-commits-cloudfoundry-and-openstack-key-steps-what-direction.
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 21
ANALYST BIO
Holger MuellerVice President and Principal Analyst
Holger Mueller is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, providing guidance for the
fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS, with forays up the tech stack into big data, analytics and SaaS.
Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including chief information officers (CIO), chief technology
officers (CTO), chief product officers (CPO), investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms and
technology buyers.
Prior to joining Constellation Research, Holger was VP of products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. He
led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new business-process-as-a-service
(BPaaS) capabilities. Previously, he was the chief application architect with SAP and was also VP of products for
FICO. Before that, he worked for Oracle in various management functions - both of the application development
(CRM, Fusion) and business development sides. Holger started his career with Kiefer & Veittinger, which he
helped grow from a startup to Europe’s largest CRM vendor from 1995 onwards. Holger has a Diplom Kaufmann
from University of Mannheim, with a focus on Information Science, Marketing, International Management and
Chemical Technology. As a native European, Mueller speaks six languages.
@holgermu | www.constellationr.com/users/holger-mueller
www.linkedin.com/in/holgermueller
© 2017 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved. 22
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