Take four acronyms—SAP, ERP, HANA and RDS—add them together, and what do you get? A trio of new HANA-infused ERP business apps delivered via SAP’s RDS (Rapid Deployment Solutions) methodology.
It’s a mouthful, but SAP’s burgeoning line of RDS apps is getting bigger: Customers can now add these three—SAP ERP for Finance and Controlling, Manufacturing, and Trading—to the “powered by HANA” list, which already includes a CRM product.
Amid the blizzard of SAPanese in the announcement, there are a couple of interesting elements, so let’s break it down:
Down with RTC? The three offerings are not generally available but RTC (released to customers) in ramp-up mode—when early adopters start kicking the tires on new products. Peter Russo, senior director marketing of RDS at SAP, says (via email) that there are live customers as well as proofs of concept going on right now.
RDS-o-Rama. The RDS option for customers is a big part of SAP’s future, and SAP claims that customers like what they see. SAP’s sales pitch goes something like this: “Preconfigured software, implementation services, best-practices content and end-user enablement,” and then add in “fixed-time, fixed-price” delivery.
So how long are we talking? “The majority of our customers deploy in 12 weeks or less, and 20 percent have done it in eight weeks,” says Russo. When asked for a ballpark figure on the price, Russo responds: “To implement the preconfigured functionality, most packages have a fixed-price implementation of between $150,000 to $250,000.”
RDS + HANA. Want HANA right now? Then the RDS option might be for you. SAP says that of all the live customers on SAP HANA (and that includes BW on HANA and HANA-based apps) more than a third are going the RDS route.
Module Marketing. Customers are going to see a new nomenclature from SAP around “modular software adoption.” In a nutshell, it’s this, according to SAP: “The modular framework of rapid-deployment solutions allows customers to select what they need when they need it, while unlocking a path to future improvements.”
It sounds really good, but the proof will be in the pudding—and whether the back-end integration work in today’s heterogeneous IT environments will be as straightforward as advertised.
Speaking of Integration… SAP is well aware of customer pain and suffering related to integration challenges—hence the modular approach to building out customers’ systems. Gard Little, research director at IDC for IT consulting and systems integration, says that some of those integration headaches can be alleviated with the RDS approach.
“The integration becomes easier when customers are willing to adapt their process to what’s capable in the predefined solution,” he says.
The problem, however, that the RDS approach cannot solve, not everything is from the same module (or vendor). Little cites recent IDC survey data that found that 83 percent of companies are integrating SaaS and on-premise solutions. “The integration of the cloud and on-premise apps is really still one of the main integration challenges,” he says. “And there’s nothing that’s going to make it easier.”
Whereforartthou Cloud Solutions? The software in the announcement is for on-premise. But a cloud option for customers is available from SAP partners, according to SAP.
But wait, there’s more! In the future, SAP promises “a new implementation experience, specifically supporting our Suite on HANA and 360 Customer related rapid-deployment solutions,” says Russo. “Customers can leverage the cloud to speed their implementation, further cutting the initial technical set-up and installation process by one-third, while having the opportunity to decide whether they would like to RUN on-premise or in a qualified partner cloud, like AWS or HP, when they port to production using this new process.”
