Analysts have been skeptical of software conglomerate SAP and its efforts to enter the cloud-computing game. While the company has culminated its cloud efforts into the HANA enterprise resource planning platform, critics say competition in the cloud is quickly rising, and are not yet convinced SAP can keep up.
Some of that skepticism dropped with SAP’s 2015 first quarter reports, which beat expectations and saw triple-digit year-over-year growth. Its cloud revenue alone grew 24 percent.
“It’s now firmly established that the disk-based database cannot handle the data explosion in the enterprise,” SAP CEO Bill McDermott said during the earnings call last month.
This month, SAP took another swing at giving its cloud services more muscle. The firm revealed Wednesday (May 6) its new HANA Cloud Platform for the Internet of Things, a tool SAP executive board member Bernd Leukert said is suitable to power apps in anything from vending machines to entire cities. “We get the possibilities of taking the data streams from these products and store them, process them in real time, adding the richness of the HANA Cloud Platform itself with the predictive [analytics] capabilities,” he said at the platform’s unveiling at the Sapphire Now 2015 event.
HANA Cloud Platform combines data analytics, geo-location technology and seamless connectivity integration for businesses, SAP said. Users can operate the platform through their own cloud or operate a cloud for their own customers.
The unveiling preceded Leukert’s reveal that SAP has strengthened ties with Intel and Siemens, a move experts say is another side of SAP’s IoT focus. Reports said Intel will develop IoT tools compatible with HANA, starting with an integration of the SAP cloud with Intel’s existing IoT gateway. Siemens, on the other hand, is reportedly planning a private cloud for its industry and will use the HANA Cloud Platform to do so.
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