Published on the 28/02/2017 | Written by Donovan Jackson

In SAP-land, everything good is called HANA. Except HANA Cloud Platform…

Demonstrating that wonderful Teutonic sense of humour, ERP vendor SAP has renamed its SAP HANA Cloud Platform, which henceforth shall be known by the more-distinctive-by-far moniker SAP Cloud Platform.

Confused? A quick recap: SAP Cloud Platform is the vendor’s platform as a service (PaaS) offering. HANA is its in memory technology, which until quite recently, was appended to flagship products, including the applications (S4/HANA) and database (SAP HANA).

In any event, SAP said the name change for its PaaS comes with new capabilities and enhancements to build new applications, expedite the extension and integration of SAP apps, power innovative Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, accelerate Big Data projects and enable machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. There was no mention of how it will handle the kitchen sink, although we are confident that this too will be taken care of by SAP Cloud Platform.

In a statement, Bernd Leukert, ‎member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Products & Innovation, explained the rationale behind the name change: “To represent its breadth of capabilities, it has been rebranded as SAP Cloud Platform.”

If anything says ‘new capabilities and enhancements to build new applications, expedite the extension and integration of SAP apps, power innovative Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, accelerate Big Data projects and enable machine learning and artificial intelligence applications’, SAP Cloud Platform must be it.

The vendor said the platform ‘creates digital differentiation by connecting a rapidly growing number of smart devices and machines with people and processes to achieve superior business outcomes’. The PaaS has been used to build over 1,000 partner apps and new services are continually being added.

Moving away from the HANA nomenclature, SAP said the SAP Cloud Platform provides the foundation for SAP Leonardo, a portfolio of IoT solutions that connects intelligent devices with people and processes; SAP Clea, a portfolio of machine learning solutions and services; and the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud solution portfolio, including SAP Digital Boardroom.

New services available on the PaaS include a Cloud Platform SDK for iOS and a Project Companion mobile app, both planned for release on March 30 and which will provide additional native iOS services; the API Business Hub which is an API catalogue; a Cloud Platform Workflow service; a Cloud Platform Virtual Machine service; the Cloud Platform IoT service; and Cloud Platform Big Data Services.

SAP also said it has commissioned new Cloud Platform data centres in Japan and China.