The introduction of Hana into the SAP architecture has disrupted SAP hosting services. By using the new models, sourcing and vendor management leaders who are focused on infrastructure technology service sourcing can develop major cost and service benefits for their businesses as they move to Hana.

1. The Impact of SAP Hana on the SAP
Infrastructure Utility Services Marketplace
Published: 3 November 2016 ID: G00313580
Analyst(s): David Groombridge, Derek Prior, Neil Barton
The introduction of Hana into the SAP architecture has disrupted SAP
hosting services. By using the new models, sourcing and vendor
management leaders who are focused on infrastructure technology service
sourcing can develop major cost and service benefits for their businesses as
they move to Hana.
Impacts
■ The new technology required to run SAP Hana will force sourcing executives to reconsider their
options for hosting SAP systems where Hana-based solutions are needed.
■ The advent of competitive new public cloud-based hosting models will create opportunities for
sourcing leaders to deliver cost savings for SAP Hana hosting.
■ The re-entrance of SAP into the SAP hosting market with its Hana Enterprise Cloud (HEC)
managed service offering will require sourcing executives to evaluate all other hosting options
against the standard set by HEC.
Recommendations
Sourcing and vendor management leaders seeking to advance their service sourcing strategy:
■ Evaluate carefully the new SAP hosting models that have emerged in the past few years. Note
that the SAP Hana architecture is very different from the traditional SAP architecture, thus
impacting the underlying infrastructure and resulting in TCO models that vary widely.
■ Decide what commercial pricing mechanism you will need from any SAP hosting provider,
ranging from fixed monthly billing to full elastic consumption-based monthly billing.
■ Source proven Basis operations expertise alongside any public cloud IaaS hosting, using skills
either in-house or from an experienced managed service provider, since public cloud IaaS
hosting providers will not supply this.
■ Evaluate SAP HEC when your business has a compelling need to use a new Hana-based
solution, such as the on-premises S/4HANA.

2. Strategic Planning Assumption
Through 2020, 80% of organizations conducting a "lift and shift" migration of internal business
applications from their own data centers to public cloud IaaS will not achieve meaningful cost
savings.
Analysis
SAP introduced SAP R/3 in July 1992 as a client/server-based ERP business application running on
a choice of relational database management systems (DBMSs) from differing vendors. Since its
introduction, many SAP ERP customers have preferred to use an SAP hosting provider to run and
manage the server components, because they chose not to retain the required SAP technical skills
within their own support organization, believing that an expert SAP partner could provide a more
reliable managed/hosting service.
Many of these SAP hosting providers gradually became more sophisticated, introducing a more
standardized and automated SAP infrastructure to improve reliability and cost-effectiveness. As
early as 2008, Gartner identified a trend for SAP hosting services that were provided in a
standardized "infrastructure utility" style. By 2013, seven major vendors had entered the
infrastructure utility for SAP (IU4SAP) market and were evaluated in detail by Gartner (see Note 1).
Since then, the market has grown, and there are now more than 170 SAP hosting vendors identified
on SAP's partner website.
1
However, in 2010, SAP launched its SAP Hana Platform, which introduced an in-memory DBMS
(IMDBMS) technology to fundamentally change the previously established DBMS "traditional"
architecture. Hana changed the established marketplace of SAP hosting providers at roughly the
same time that cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) took off. This combination of trends is now
starting to significantly transform and disrupt the market for all forms of SAP hosting.
Page 2 of 15 Gartner, Inc. | G00313580

3. Figure 1. Impacts and Top Recommendations for Sourcing and Vendor Management Leaders
Source: Gartner (November 2016)
Impacts and Recommendations
The new technology required to run SAP Hana will force sourcing executives to
reconsider their options for hosting SAP systems where Hana-based solutions are
needed
Six technical layers are required to run a classic SAP ERP application, from the data center facility
up to the SAP software. Before the advent of Hana, there were four broadly distinct approaches to
sourcing SAP hosting, as shown in Figure 2.
Gartner, Inc. | G00313580 Page 3 of 15

4. Figure 2. Traditional SAP Hosting Models
ABAP = Advanced Business Application Programming
Source: Gartner (November 2016)
SAP customers that need maximum control over the SAP technical stack (which can include Java
as well as Advanced Business Application Programming [ABAP] components) often prefer to own
and operate it within their own data center (Figure 1, Option 1). Some customers do this, but use an
SAP service provider to remotely manage the SAP Basis operations and database management
layers (Figure 1, Option 2).
In an IU4SAP service (Figure 1, Options 3 and 4), the vendor provides the complete technical stack
from its own data center for a monthly fee, which could be based on the number of users, number
of servers, server capacity usage and storage allocation, or even transaction volumes. Within both
the private hosting or private cloud options (Figure 1, Option 3), or the more leveraged model of
Option 4, ad hoc tasks such as transports, client copies and system copies can be purchased at a
Page 4 of 15 Gartner, Inc. | G00313580

5. fixed price from a menu of charges. This frees SAP customers from all technical operations
responsibilities, allowing them to focus on services that, in the past, have been separate from the
SAP hosting contract: buying the SAP software licenses, implementing the right application
functionality, and managing the live application (which comprises application development,
management and operational services, as set out in the "Magic Quadrant for SAP Application
Management Services, Worldwide").
However, Hana technology introduces some major differences from the traditional SAP architecture
shown above:
■ The Hana architecture only runs on the Hana IMDBMS, not the traditional DBMSs from other
vendors.
■ The Hana IMDBMS requires much larger amounts of server main memory because the entire
database operates in main memory. When Hana was introduced to the market, all Hana
infrastructure components were packaged into an appliance, including data persistence onto
dedicated disk storage within the appliance.
■ Hana requires new software tools to manage it (see "SAP Basis Operations Teams Need to
Learn New Tools to Manage SAP Hana Systems").
■ Server virtualization is much less commonly deployed with Hana technology today than with
traditional SAP architecture. Such virtualization is mainly deployed at the application server
layer, which is still needed, and where commodity infrastructure is so effective.
■ The Hana IMDBMS includes its own data replication features, which impact high availability and
disaster recovery operations (see "SAP Hana Best Practices for High Availability and Disaster
Recovery").
■ Other potential Hana IMDBMS technical differences include the multitenancy and data
temperature options, although these features are not yet widely used.
■ Client feedback consistently shows that larger Hana appliances are more expensive than
traditional servers.
For third-party SAP hosting providers, Hana is both an opportunity and a threat. These providers
face substantial engineering costs in designing new platforms suitable for Hana. SAP applications
run very differently on Hana architecture compared with traditional architecture. Existing hosting
offerings must be redesigned to provide the large memory OS instances that Hana needs, and
virtualization technologies must be re-evaluated against using Hana's core capabilities. Hosting
services for SAP must be regularly recertified as new Hana software versions are released (see
"Best Practices for Selecting a Managed Private Cloud Service Provider for SAP Hana Production
Systems"). Moreover, while Hana systems were initially introduced only as highly preconfigured,
pretested appliances in order to preserve simplicity and performance, SAP subsequently introduced
the more flexible Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) option (see "Considerations When Selecting a
SAP Hana Platform Vendor"), thereby creating far greater testing responsibilities for providers.
Gartner, Inc. | G00313580 Page 5 of 15

6. Figure 3 highlights the impact that Hana technology creates on the infrastructure delivery options for
the SAP technical stack. In addition to Option 4, SAP customers now have two new infrastructure
service selections to evaluate — Options 5 and 6. For completeness, the full software as a service
(SaaS) offering for SAP — Option 7 — is included in Figure 3, but discussion of this is beyond the
scope of this research.
Figure 3. Options for Managing the SAP Technology Stack With Hana
ABAP = Advanced Business Application Programming
Source: Gartner (November 2016)
Today, most SAP hosting providers offer Option 4 (in Figure 3) for Hana systems in one of two
forms:
■ Servicing all the SAP technical stack layers, including their own Basis operations managed
service; or …
Page 6 of 15 Gartner, Inc. | G00313580

7. ■ As a private cloud IaaS hosted within their own data center. Several of these vendors have
evolved their previous IU4SAP offerings for this delivery option (see Table 1).
As Option 5 in Figure 3 shows, another delivery alternative is to use a public cloud IaaS vendor in
combination with a separate, experienced SAP service provider for the Basis operations (including
database management) layer in the SAP technical stack. Many customers have concerns and
industry regulations regarding data location to address, so the cloud data center location and
security are core issues that will have to be resolved.
SAP has also re-entered the hosting market with its own cloudlike hosting model, Hana Enterprise
Cloud (HEC), which is one example of the managed private cloud option (Figure 3, Option 6). In this
model, SAP provides the entire IaaS hosting and Basis managed service model for all layers of the
stack, except for any custom ABAP code, which is still maintained by the customer. For providers,
this is another challenge: Competition, already fierce, is now made worse by the existence of SAP's
HEC offering, against which all other hosting providers will be compared. Gartner expects that a
number of the smaller SAP hosting providers will find their businesses no longer viable and exit the
market, although there may be an opportunity for some to partner with SAP to deliver HEC as a
white-labeled hosting solution. Another issue for SAP customers is that there are very few reference
customers anywhere that are live on Hana systems, for either S/4HANA or Business Suite on Hana
(BSoH), and have proven disaster recovery capabilities.
SAP S/4HANA cloud editions are new and very different because they are multitenant software as a
service (SaaS) solutions that are available only directly from SAP (Figure 3, Option 7). SaaS solutions
are very different from general IaaS SAP hosting technology options (see Note 2).
The market for Hana hosting is growing as more of SAP's customer base migrates. A 2016 Gartner
survey identified more than 170 vendors offering SAP hosting.
2
For convenience, they may be
grouped into the four categories shown in Table 1.
Gartner, Inc. | G00313580 Page 7 of 15

8. Table 1. Sample SAP Hosting Providers by Category of Service
Global Service
Integrators
SAP Specialists Local Hosting Partners
New Cloud
Entrants
Number of
Providers
29 11 129 6
Selected
Sample
Providers
Accenture
Atos
Capgemini
CGI
CSC
Evry
Fujitsu
Hewlett Packard
Enterprise
IBM
NTT Data
T-Systems
Tieto
Arvato
Ciber
Ctac
Freudenberg IT (FIT)
itesys
itelligence
KCloud
KMD
Oediv
Ordina
oXya
Scheer
Secure-24
Symmetry
Velocity Technology
Solutions
24 ASAP
Axians
Basis Consulting
Bedag Informatik
Besh
ERPsourcing
Gisa
Innflow
ISO-Gruppe
iStreet
KIO
NewVision Consulting
QSC
Seidor
TCC Technology
vonRoll
Amazon Web
Services (AWS)*
CenturyLink
Microsoft Azure*
SAP (HEC)
Virtustream
* IaaS only; no Basis managed service included
Source: Gartner (November 2016)
The survey showed that most global service integrators have 200 or more SAP hosting customers,
whereas the local players rarely have more than 100. The new cloud entrants have grown rapidly to
customer bases of around 200 each. It is worth mentioning that the SAP hosting market is
particularly competitive in Germany, where SAP is very strong among small and midsize customers
(the "Mittelstand") that do not have the IT infrastructure to operate a complex SAP technical
environment on their own.
However, few SAP hosting providers currently have more than 50 customers running live Hana
production instances. A much larger number of customers are running Hana in test or development
environments as they evaluate the new technology.
The Gartner survey also showed that about one in four vendors commonly charge for SAP hosting
on a "pay per use" basis — usually on a "per named user" or "per SAP Application Performance
Standard (SAPS)" basis (although this is less relevant for Hana; see Note 3). However, there is a
large, laggard base of vendors (about 40%) that rarely uses this pricing structure, and some
customers prefer the predictability of a fixed monthly managed service charge.
Recommendations:
Sourcing executives and SAP practice leaders:
Page 8 of 15 Gartner, Inc. | G00313580

9. ■ Plan Hana-specific strategies for your SAP hosting, taking account of the key differences in
infrastructure required to run an SAP Hana architecture compared with traditional SAP
architectures.
■ Decide what commercial pricing mechanism you will need from any SAP hosting provider,
ranging from fixed monthly billing to full elastic consumption-based monthly billing.
■ Conduct your own total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis rather than drawing conclusions from
other TCO comparisons. When comparing the TCO of an in-house system delivery option with
cloud IaaS alternatives, be aware that Gartner research (as explained in "Can You Save Money
Migrating to Cloud IaaS?") shows that the latter option can be anywhere between 50% less
expensive to 20% more expensive.
■ Ensure that any SAP hosting provider being considered to run SAP Hana-based business
applications is certified by SAP for SAP Hana operations,
3
or certified for public cloud hosting
(see next section below).
■ Seek detailed operational evidence from any potential SAP hosting partners on their Hana
hosting capabilities, taken from their existing operations. This is an immature market from a live
Hana production system perspective, which means that locating live reference customers —
especially those with proven disaster recovery capabilities — remains challenging.
The advent of competitive new public cloud-based hosting models will create
opportunities for sourcing leaders to deliver cost savings for SAP Hana hosting
During the same period in which SAP introduced Hana technology, there has also been a huge
client interest in both private and public IaaS for all IT projects, including SAP infrastructure (see
"Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide"). Full cloud IaaS provides on-
demand, near-real-time, self-service access to abstracted, programmatically accessible and highly
automated infrastructure resources, delivering Option 5 in Figure 3. However, pure IaaS excludes
the SAP Basis managed service component.
Hana on AWS: Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first public cloud IaaS provider to offer Hana
systems. Its 2013 SAP partnership offered Hana One database as a service, which allowed a
complete Hana instance to be provisioned on AWS public cloud IaaS in less than an hour. This
enabled customers and SAP partners of all types to quickly and cost-effectively acquire Hana
technology for evaluations, software development and proof-of-concept trials, and pay for it on an
hourly basis. Subsequently, SAP has certified the AWS public cloud IaaS service to run full
production systems of Hana-based applications, starting with SAP BSoH, followed by SAP
Business Warehouse (BW) powered by SAP Hana and then S/4HANA. More recently, in September
2016, SAP and AWS announced support for the new SAP BW/4HANA data warehouse solution.
The X1 AWS server "instance types" are optimized for high memory, and two new types were
recently introduced to provide support for Hana. The x1.32xlarge instance type provides 2TB of
RAM backed by the requisite storage, while the x1.16xlarge instance provides 1TB of RAM. Each
instance type is fully certified for all single-node SAP Hana workloads like S/4HANA and BSoH, as
well as BW and BW/4HANA. In addition, both instance types are certified by SAP for scale-out
Gartner, Inc. | G00313580 Page 9 of 15

10. configurations where, today, up to seven instances can be chained together to provide 14TB of
memory. The x1.32xlarge instance type has been benchmarked at 132,000 SAPS (see Note 3;
around 24,000 typical users), and both X1 instance types are currently available globally in 11 of the
14 existing AWS regions.
Hana on Azure: The second major public cloud IaaS provider, Microsoft Azure, also supports SAP
Hana. In May 2016, Microsoft announced that SAP had certified Azure for Hana workloads up to
3TB in size, and also certified scale-out to support Hana BW workloads up to 32TB in size. Again,
these deployments are limited to certain regions only, but Microsoft will extend these over time;
also, it is likely that the range of SAP solutions supported by Azure will continue to expand, because
Microsoft has a track record of catching up in other late-entry marketplaces (see "In-Depth
Assessment of Microsoft Azure IaaS").
Cloud hosting considerations: Neither AWS nor Azure directly supports the full layers of the SAP
technical stack. Rather, they focus on the lower three layers, including the hypervisor, but excluding
the OS. This means that other new service providers have partnered with these cloud providers to
deliver the remaining top layers in the technical stack, without providing their own Hana-ready
infrastructure. However, because multiple providers are now involved, SAP customers must be very
careful when planning or operating any hosting arrangements involving IaaS. When comparing the
TCO of public cloud proposals, sourcing executives must take into account the cost of not just the
cloud platforms, but also these middleware service providers. In the operational phase, the
operational service and vendor management of multiple suppliers must be tied in from the start,
potentially using a multisourcing service integrator (MSI) to provide them (see "Research Roundup
for the MSI-SIAM Role").
In addition to providing large-scale infrastructure optimized for Hana, both AWS and Azure deliver
flexibility over charging options. Most clients usually start off with a pay-as-you-go model for
individual servers, where savings can be made initially by using the cloud in new ways — for
example, by turning off unused development and test environments. In the longer term, clients can
save more money with prepaid options. AWS's Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers the
concept of "Reserved Instances," where, by booking server usage and paying partially or
completely upfront, clients can achieve discounts of up to 75%, compared with the pay-as-you-go
model. Likewise, Azure also offers prepaid models, but has the option for smaller businesses to buy
through their existing resellers, and for larger businesses to enter into an Enterprise Agreement.
Both of these options provide substantial discounts.
Both cloud providers are competing on price, and have offered regular, competitive price
reductions. The AWS strategy is to pass on to its customers a series of public cloud IaaS cost
reductions (with more than 50 being claimed by AWS, to date) by focusing on scale of deployment
and increased automation (see "In-Depth Assessment of Amazon Web Services"). Azure matches
this with a commitment to the market to "match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity
services,"
4
and with its own price reductions. Both AWS and Azure are popular choices for midsize
enterprises because costs can be spread over multiple years and match business demand, rather
than having to make regular expenditures on capital upgrade programs.
Recommendations:
Page 10 of 15 Gartner, Inc. | G00313580

11. Sourcing executives and SAP leaders:
■ Determine whether public cloud IaaS options for running SAP Hana are, or will be, available in
your region when designing a managed service strategy for Hana. Ensure that appropriate
public cloud Hana production deployments, certified partners and solutions are leveraged (see
"Find Certified IaaS Platforms" in the Certified SAP Hana Hardware Directory).
■ Use the Gartner solution comparison (see "Solution Comparison for Public IaaS Cloud
Providers") when comparing AWS and Microsoft Azure from a purely IaaS point of view (that is,
the lower four layers of the SAP technical stack). Be careful when comparing costs to include
the same SAP technical stack layers, especially Basis operations.
■ Complement the use of IaaS for SAP Hana with Basis operations expertise from in-house or, if
required, proven outsourcing providers, recognizing that public cloud IaaS hosting providers will
not supply Basis operations expertise. Plan the service integration of multiple public cloud IaaS
hosting providers from the outset.
■ Watch for aggressive cost reductions from both AWS and Microsoft Azure in the coming years
for the pure IaaS layers, since this is the newest part of the market of SAP hosting providers
with the fastest rate of change.
The re-entrance of SAP into the SAP hosting market with its Hana Enterprise Cloud
(HEC) managed service offering will require sourcing executives to evaluate all other
hosting options against the standard set by HEC
In 2009, SAP exited the SAP hosting market when it sold its hosting business to T-Systems.
However, by 2013, SAP was back in the market with multiple cloud hosting services (see Note 2). Of
these, the most disruptive has been HEC.
HEC is a managed service plus Hana-based IaaS that enables customers to buy the hosting and
operation of SAP Hana-based workloads from SAP in a one-stop shop. In addition to BW, both of
SAP's major application suites — BSoH and the newer S/4HANA — can be hosted on HEC. Fixed
size configurations (ranging from 256GB to 12TB) are offered, with 24/7 support and availability
options of 99.5% and 99.7% for production systems. In September 2016, SAP introduced a more
expensive 99.9% option. Applications are hosted on dedicated database servers, most often at
SAP's data centers in the U.S., Germany, Japan, Australia, Russia and Canada. About 10% of HEC
customers are hosted with partners (such as IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise [HPE], CenturyLink
and Virtustream) if SAP does not operate HEC data centers in the customers' countries. Despite the
name, HEC is not a full "pay per use" cloud service like AWS or Azure. When HEC was introduced,
customers were charged a fixed monthly price and typically had to commit to a 36-month contract
term for production systems. However, in September 2016, SAP introduced some pricing options
for more flexible increases in consumption, as well as reductions in consumption (for example,
weekend shutdowns of application servers and long-term shutdowns of entire SAP systems).
A big advantage of HEC is that SAP has the ability to include subscription-based pricing of SAP
products as an alternative to perpetual licensing. HEC also offers additional Enhanced Managed
Gartner, Inc. | G00313580 Page 11 of 15

12. Services to include Basis operations for one-off activities (for example, client copy, client refresh
and system copy).
SAP has invested heavily in HEC. It can be purchased only from SAP, not through its channels, and
SAP has assembled a large dedicated HEC sales force. Early takeup was extremely strong, and, by
2H16, SAP had already won nearly 500 customers, mostly in EMEA and North America, with smaller
numbers in Asia/Pacific and Latin America. However, some Gartner clients have reported that the
service could be unreliable as SAP struggled to scale up internal resources and sign new hosting
partners. SAP now reports that it has engaged additional resources to help respond to the high
demand for HEC.
SAP now finds it difficult to express its range of hosting choices simply. SAP customers are also
frequently confused by the co-opetition SAP has created with traditional SAP hosting businesses
(some of which are HEC delivery partners) and public cloud providers (such as AWS and Azure).
HEC provides a way for SAP to accelerate the adoption of S/4HANA (and other Hana use cases) for
customers that still want a highly customized environment (which is not possible in an S/4HANA
public cloud SaaS environment). Customers also expect that SAP will accelerate the
implementation of Hana, better support new Hana-based products and provide them with regular,
ongoing revenue streams.
Recommendations:
Sourcing executives and SAP leaders:
■ Evaluate HEC as a potential managed service option, since it sets the standard against which all
other SAP hosting services will be measured. Ensure that any TCO comparison to other models
is done on a like-for-like cost and service basis.
■ Evaluate HEC if you need the simplicity of a one-stop shop for your entire SAP environment,
and you either are buying one of the newer Hana-based solutions (such as the on-premises S/
4HANA) or have a relatively simple homogeneous SAP environment. In October 2016, HEC had
an estimated 50 live S/4HANA production systems.
■ Select a third-party Hana hosting provider if:
■ You have many other workloads to host besides Hana, and you want to host them all in one
data center …
■ The third-party provider offers either better value for money than HEC, or additional services
to help you migrate to Hana and manage that environment; and/or …
■ You need your data center hosting environment to be approved by a regulatory body that
has not yet approved HEC.
Gartner Recommended Reading
Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.
Page 12 of 15 Gartner, Inc. | G00313580

13. "Best Practices for Selecting a Managed Private Cloud Service Provider for SAP Hana Production
Systems"
"SAP S/4HANA Research Roundup"
"The Primary Use Cases for SAP Hana Solutions, 2015"
"The Financial Case for Moving to the Cloud"
Evidence
1 For the full list of SAP hosting partners, see "Find SAP Certified Outsourcing Operations Partners
Easily."
2 In July 2016, Gartner analysis identified more than 170 providers of SAP hosting services globally.
During August and September 2016, Gartner asked these same providers to complete an online
survey regarding the nature of their SAP hosting services in order to provide data for this research.
3 See the full list of SAP-certified providers for SAP Hana operations at "Find SAP Certified
Outsourcing Operations Partners Easily."
4 This quote is taken from the Microsoft Azure blog entry "The Power of 'And.'"
Note 1 Major IU4SAP SAP Hosting Providers
IU4SAP is highly standardized and automated SAP Basis operations managed services that include
outsourced infrastructure and are paid for using a resource usage (or resource allocation) model.
These models are described more extensively in Gartner's archived research listed in Table 2.
Table 2. Gartner's Original Research on IU4SAP Hosting Providers
Research Note Title Year
"IU4SAP Offerings: Accenture's Private Cloud Solution for SAP" 2012
"Capgemini Aims at Gaining Momentum With Its Infrastructure Utility for SAP Offering" 2012
"Infrastructure Utility for SAP Applications: CSC CloudIU for SAP" 2012
"Infrastructure Utility for SAP: When to Consider Using Fujitsu's FlexFrame" 2012
"Infrastructure Utility for SAP: An Analysis of HCL Technologies' Offerings" 2012
"Infrastructure Utility for SAP Applications: HP ECS-Utility for SAP Offering" 2012
"Infrastructure Utility for SAP Applications: T-Systems' Dynamic Services for SAP Solutions" 2012
Source: Gartner (November 2016)
Gartner, Inc. | G00313580 Page 13 of 15

14. Note 2 SAP's Other Cloud Services
At the heart of SAP's cloud strategy, SAP offers SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur and Fieldglass only
as full SaaS offerings. Hosting is built into the offerings in the same way as Salesforce or Workday
competitors do.
Apart from HEC, SAP also offers:
■ Hana Cloud Platform (HCP): This is a platform as a service (PaaS) hosted on shared servers at
SAP's data centers, providing database, application and integration capabilities. HCP is aimed
at customers that want to extend SAP SaaS and on-premises applications, to integrate with
these applications or to design brand new applications. Prices start at €23 per user per month,
but a free trial offering is available for developers that want to learn and explore the technology.
■ Hana One: This is a database PaaS hosted at Amazon Web Services (AWS), paid for by the
hour, that clients can purchase and provision quickly and easily through the AWS Web
Marketplace.
To further complicate the choice, under SAP's Partner Managed Cloud program, a customer can
procure SAP licenses and host them with a third-party service provider with near-zero upfront
capital costs.
Note 3 SAPS
SAPS is a measure of a server's processing capacity. SAP defined a benchmark workload, and
server vendors run this benchmark and report the performance of their products. Results are
published after they are audited by SAP (see SAP Standard Application Benchmarks).
In the traditional SAP hosting market, it became common to price services on a "per-SAPS, per-
month" basis (or per kSAPS, since most servers now deliver several thousand SAPS). However, in
the Hana hosting market, the most important measure of a server's capacity is not processing
power, but rather memory. Therefore, Hana hosting services are usually based on a "per-server, per-
month" tariff, with a range of servers offered in "T-shirt sizes" (small/medium/large), each with a
memory capacity defined in gigabytes of RAM.
Page 14 of 15 Gartner, Inc. | G00313580

15. GARTNER HEADQUARTERS
Corporate Headquarters
56 Top Gallant Road
Stamford, CT 06902-7700
USA
+1 203 964 0096
Regional Headquarters
AUSTRALIA
BRAZIL
JAPAN
UNITED KINGDOM
For a complete list of worldwide locations,
visit http://www.gartner.com/technology/about.jsp
© 2016 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. This
publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner’s prior written permission. If you are authorized to access
this publication, your use of it is subject to the Usage Guidelines for Gartner Services posted on gartner.com. The information contained
in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy,
completeness or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in such information. This
publication consists of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. The opinions
expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues,
Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company,
and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner’s Board of
Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization
without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner
research, see “Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity.”
Gartner, Inc. | G00313580 Page 15 of 15