Is the HANA Cloud Platform Designed for HANA Washing?
What This Article Covers
- What is HANA Washing?
- What is HANA Cloud Platform?
- How Does SAP Use HANA Cloud Platform to Perform HANA Washing?
Introduction
In this article, I wanted to cover a major strategy that seems to come from SAP marketing. This is what lead the HANA Cloud Platform to have the word “HANA” in the name and how SAP has been using this development environment to HANA washing its other applications.
What is HANA Washing?
The industry term for presenting one’s revenues as more cloud-based than they are is called “cloud washing.” This is something that SAP does quite frequently. In a previous article, I explained how the HCP is explicitly designed for cloud washing. However, HCP is also intended for HANA washing. HANA washing is not a commonly used term, but it seems like a natural extension of cloud washing. So I am introducing it in this article and hope it catches on. This is because SAP is constantly trying to make its installations seem more “HANA” than they are. HCP is a big part of this HANA washing. In fact, its naming seems specifically designed for both cloud washing and HANA washing.
What is HANA Cloud Platform?
Some people incorrectly state that HANA is a both a database/development environment and application. This is not correct, and one of the reasons for this confusion is because HANA was, for marketing purposes, added to the name of SAP’s connective development environment.
- HANA is a database
- HCP is a development environment
- Neither is an application
- Neither is it a platform
The HANA Cloud Platform is a development environment, but one which is tied to SAP’s hosting and the use of SAP HANA Infrastructure Services (HIS). HIS is something else, so let us tackle one topic at a time. This article is about the HCP, not the HIS. If we follow SAP’s logic, we will only smush everything together and say everything is a database or a platform or a PaaS or an IaaS depending upon the flexible needs of SAP marketing and sales. This article is about the HCP, not the HIS.
Now a development environment allows you to code to create custom programs. Development environment needs to connect to things like databases. There are many development environments out there, and this is not something that SAP has historically offered.
And this tethering of the HCP to the HIS is a problem because it restricts what you can do with the development environment. The problem with using a development environment from SAP is that SAP wants to use the HCP to redirect the customer to make more SAP purchases and to cut down the options for the developer and the customer overall. SAP seeks to tether the application to the database, and then the development environment to the application provider. This constant tethering is designed to cut down the freedom of their customers and is textbook account control.
A development environment allows you to code to create custom programs. Development environment needs to connect to things like databases. There are many development environments out there, and this is not something that SAP has historically offered.
How Does SAP Use HANA Cloud Platform to Perform HANA Washing?
- There is absolutely no reason to put the term “HANA” in the HCP.
- HCP has absolutely nothing to do with HANA. HANA is a database, and HCP is a development environment that can connect to HANA, or 12c or any database for that manner.
The reason for SAP to call place HANA in the product name is very simply to confuse people as to whether or not HANA is deployed. This is an example of merely a trick of HANA washing by SAP. Now for some time into the future, HCP will be used as the term to confuse customers and Wall Street as to how much HANA is being used. SAP routinely states that “with the HANA Cloud Platform companies can” fill in the blank. SAP knows that people will read the words HANA in HCP and mistakenly think that the HCP has something to do with HANA. But their documentation and statements about the HCP go on to further confuse the issue. Here is a perfect example:
With flexible subscription models and optional services for apps, database, and infrastructure, it provides instant access to the full power of SAP HANA.
No, that is not true. One can access any of these things with any development environment. That is you can use the HCP or use another development environment and access all the same things. The “full power of SAP HANA” (which is no better and seems to perform worse than Oracle 12c) is available from any development environment that one decides to connect to SAP HANA.
Purposeful Confusion
This confusion will persist for quite some time. I am still speaking with people who are confusing S/4HANA with SAP HANA, which is easy to do because of SAP’s confusing naming.
Secondly, the HANA Cloud Platform is free, so there is no traceability possible as to how much SAP HANA is being used. When SAP HANA started performing very poorly in sales, SAP stopped breaking out SAP HANA as a revenue item under McDermott’s logic that “everything SAP does now connect to HANA.”
Conclusion
- SAP’s naming of the HANA Cloud Platform and their discussion around HCP is deliberate and deceptive.
- HANA Cloud Platform is an example of both cloud washing and HANA washing — all in one product.
- Almost no one uses the HANA Cloud Platform, so SAP can say whatever they want to about it. They propose 20,000 “developers” using it, but I know several people who created and account and logged in, and aren’t developing anything in it. Most of SAP’s numerical claims like the fact it has 3700 S/4 “customers” are always inflated.
- The HANA Cloud Platform will be used in SAP’s marketing offensives to mislead companies. Both regarding how much SAP installations are cloud based and how much HANA is deployed.
- If the HANA Cloud Platformnever rises above even a tiny fraction of users, this will not stop SAP from telling customers and Wall Street that it is revolutionizing projects. And even better, its growth cannot be tracked because it is free and will not have any revenues to report. I see the HANA Cloud PlatformHCP being saddled up by SAP marketing to be ridden for a long time.
References
I cover how to interpret risk for IT projects in the following book.
I cover risk estimation for projects in the following book.
Rethinking Enterprise Software Risk: Controlling the Main Risk Factors on IT Projects
Better Managing Software Risk
The software implementation is risky business and success is not a certainty. But you can reduce risk with the strategies in this book. Undertaking software selection and implementation without approximating the project’s risk is a poor way to make decisions about either projects or software. But that’s the way many companies do business, even though 50 percent of IT implementations are deemed failures.
Finding What Works and What Doesn’t
In this book, you will review the strategies commonly used by most companies for mitigating software project risk — and learn why these plans don’t work — and then acquire practical and realistic strategies that will help you to maximize success on your software implementation.
Chapters
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Enterprise Software Risk Management
Chapter 3: The Basics of Enterprise Software Risk Management
Chapter 4: Understanding the Enterprise Software Market
Chapter 5: Software Sell-ability versus Implementability
Chapter 6: Selecting the Right IT Consultant
Chapter 7: How to Use the Reports of Analysts Like Gartner
Chapter 8: How to Interpret Vendor-Provided Information to Reduce Project Risk
Chapter 9: Evaluating Implementation Preparedness
Chapter 10: Using TCO for Decision Making
Chapter 11: The Software Decisions’ Risk Component Model
Risk Estimation and Calculation
See our free project risk estimators that are available per application. The provide a method of risk analysis that is not available from other sources.
Risk Estimation Calculator
