Complimenting your existing On-Premise or Cloud applications

[Former Member]

I wanted to share an interesting fact before I get into the actual subject. For the 2012 Presidential Campaign, one of our presidential candidates has leveraged the ‘Power of CRM’ in SaaS/PaaS model. The tool was used to register the voters, gather the feedback, run analytics on the feedback, targeting the popular subjects etc. He/She ran a successful campaign and you know who that is :smile: . The point here is high degree of scalability, rapid application deployment, responding to the demand at a great speed and above all staying competitive. Isn’t it amazing?

Let’s get into the actual subject. As discussed in my previous blog, making the right decision between on-premise and cloud applications is very important for businesses to stay competitive and increase revenue.

A lot of investment has already gone into the on-premise implementations and at the same time customers in order to stay competitive will have to explore the pros & cons of cloud computing and achieve a balance between new innovative cloud technologies and existing investment in the on-premise solutions.

Within your existing on premise systems, you may be carrying out some very performance intensive processes. For example: running segmentation across the prospective and existing customer base and targeting them for new products or services. The customer base in some industries can be huge and your existing SAP ECC/CRM with TREX indexing may not take all the load. The speed at which you reach the market is important as these are performance intensive functions and will take hours to segment without the right system resources. There could be numerous other examples based on my experience and client engagements.

SAP HANA Cloud Platform is a PaaS based model with a lot of features(Eg: in-memory computing, analytics etc) where you can built loosely coupled business applications and compliment your existing on premise applications. Using this you can build applications with low TCO while still using your robust on-premise applications or processes. You can build applications and integrate with SAP or non-SAP systems.

The same SAP HANA Cloud Platform can be leveraged for custom extensions within your cloud applications (Eg: SuccessFactors). SAP provides a baseline SaaS based application based on the industry best practices. While we all want to go with best practices it may not suit the business requirements and has to be extended and this is a great platform to compliment your on-premise or cloud applications.