SAP HANA Cloud Reviews

SAP HANA Cloud is used in many different organizations such as retail, manufacturing, and pharmacy; most businesses can use SAP HANA Cloud.

From my perspective, the best features of SAP HANA Cloud are that it's an ERP system connecting all departments together, making it a very smooth software for business operations. It can also be integrated with other systems for better performance and analysis, allowing you to generate reports and obtain the data needed for your decisions with just a click of a button.

SAP HANA Cloud's in-memory technology makes it faster for retrieving the data because it stores the data in RAM, allowing you to access it quicker than before.

In future updates of SAP HANA Cloud, I would suggest some changes in the user interfaces to make it more user-friendly.

I have been using SAP HANA Cloud for four years.

Regarding technical support from SAP HANA Cloud, they have specific rules in place, and it depends on whether you are working with partners. If the partner doesn't help you, you can raise a ticket with SAP directly, and they will assign some of their consultants to check the solution. However, they only support standard SAP solutions and do not assist with customizations needed from the partner or your side.

I would rate the technical support of SAP HANA Cloud an eight out of 10, with 10 being the highest.

Positive

Before SAP HANA Cloud, I worked with Oracle JD Edwards.

I switched from Oracle to SAP HANA Cloud because the decision-makers at that time saw that SAP HANA Cloud would be better than Oracle, so they decided to move on.

There are no challenges or complexities with the deployment of SAP HANA Cloud; it is very easy. Just when there's some customization, it takes some additional time.

I act as an integrator when I deploy it within the customer's environment.

Some implementations can be finished in the same day, within a couple of hours, while others may take a couple of days to configure everything within the customer's environment.

We are a team that usually does the installation together.

Currently, we are four people in the team, and the maximum number I worked with was 12.

I have seen a return on investment from using SAP HANA Cloud. Before any implementation, we check the ROI, and if it doesn't match our targets, we will not proceed with it.

We can say that SAP HANA Cloud is expensive compared to other modules or systems, but I think it is acceptable; if it becomes slightly cheaper, it will be better.

I am satisfied with SAP HANA Cloud and don't see any room for improvement.

I don't use SAP HANA Cloud's machine learning feature at this moment.

Currently, we don't use SAP HANA Cloud's ability to support hybrid data landscapes in our organization.

SAP HANA Cloud can integrate real-time analytics with transactional data processing in my businesses by connecting it with other systems such as government systems and HR systems for fingerprint recognition.

We are already using BOBJ or SAP BW for predictive analytics, which is an old solution from SAP.

My overall rating for SAP HANA Cloud is eight out of 10. The reason I don't give it a higher score is that there are some concerns related to security and certain features that I have not seen yet.

I have been working for the last 25 years with SAP. It started with ECC, HANA, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and for module-specific work, I have worked on P2P, OTC, APO in the supply chain. All these modules are basically plant logistics and manufacturing.

I have completed four projects for SAP HANA Cloud.

The real-time analytics feature is good; there is no doubt about it. As far as all the MIS reports, dashboards, and analytical reports are concerned, they are good.

The machine learning and artificial intelligence features of SAP HANA are good, but the acceptance is not good, and the way people are being educated for it is lacking. Once people are properly educated, they can use it more.

My opinion on SAP HANA Cloud is that it is a waste of time. I do not think it should exist; HANA on-premise or Private Cloud is better than this Public Cloud.

For companies with a single line of production or simple production cycles, I would recommend SAP HANA Cloud. It is basically a hyperscale of B1, nothing else. It hinders any configuration required to be done, and users are not able to do it. In that way, it is not user-friendly. Moreover, it is very slow; the system becomes slow, and on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, if you have to work, sometimes you do not get the server because of refreshing.

SAP HANA Cloud should allow more configuration.

I have been working for the last 25 years with SAP.

Overall, the technical support by SAP is very bad and very time-consuming. It flows through multiple people, similar to what we say in India about a government office; it goes from one person to another person, and then they will ask some questions. Then they will come up with a trivial question that is a consulting issue, not an SAP issue.

I would rate their technical support a four, maximum five.

Neutral

Instead of SAP HANA Cloud, there are many other ERPs and homegrown solutions. In India, there are two or three software solutions that have emerged. People have started using them, and they use them for reporting purposes only. They take four or five licenses for SAP and do the reporting there.

I have not thought about how to make the product more competitive at present, but there might be room for improvement.

My opinion on their marketing strategy overall by SAP is that they are leaders. I do not think they have to market to people; by default, they gain business through word-of-mouth publicity. The only concern is their pricing is very high nowadays; people might shift to other homegrown ERPs if that continues.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate SAP HANA Cloud a seven.

We deploy SAP HANA Cloud for customers primarily in the mid-market, small and medium enterprise segment. This includes manufacturing companies, service-oriented companies, professional services, media houses, wholesale distributors, high-tech companies, construction engineering companies, discrete manufacturing companies, and CPG companies.

SAP HANA Cloud provides a single version of truth, automation, intelligence, process control, and best practices.

The embedded real-time analytics come out of the box. While additional analytics can be deployed separately, most users utilize the embedded analytics.

It provides a holistic picture by helping with the digital twin situation in enterprises where all or most applications and software, including hardware, can be integrated for harmonized reporting in real time within S/4.

The support providing aspects could be more transparent. SAP HANA Cloud requires extensive documentation before connecting with a human being to troubleshoot an issue.

The sandbox capabilities of the environment could be made more efficient. The test or quality environment could be populated with production data to replicate live environment scenarios easily. With S/4 today, this process isn't as seamless because it's a service provided by SAP with a certain service cost.

Regarding innovations, clarity of the process needs improvement. Recently, SAP makes commercial changes before having supporting documentation ready. Better planning in this area would help implementers.

I have been working with SAP since 2009. SAP HANA Cloud as a product was released around 2013.

The solution is deployed only in the cloud, not the Enterprise Cloud.

SAP HANA Cloud is extremely scalable. The scope is deployed as easily stackable feature components. Additional features can be added to scale out. Users can add additional legal entities and expand beyond borders with pre-built localization aspects. It's very easy to scale beyond borders after the first implementation, as the solution can be simply redeployed or extended into other geographies, additional legal entities, or expanded scope.

The customer service is excellent, with SAP maintaining a 99.7% SLA commitment.

Positive

The setup is fairly straightforward with best practices built into the solution. It's easier to deploy than a blank canvas solution that most ERPs provide, which helps SAP HANA Cloud stand out.

Implementation typically requires at least one domain specialist per domain, with the number of domains subject to the customer's scope. For a finance-led implementation, it would require a finance person and possibly one associate. For an operational services ERP, it would need specialists in finance, sales, procurement, and potentially a project resource for project-focused companies. Manufacturing implementations require additional resources for supply chain, manufacturing, maintenance, and quality.

Return on investment is typically achieved within three to six months.

My experience is predominantly with SAP HANA Cloud and ECC, not Business One.

My responsibilities involve overall delivery management. While Integration Suite may come up, due to my core expertise in the functional side of business processes, I don't deal with the technical aspects of Integration Suite.

As an implementer, my role focuses on deployment rather than system usage. The rating for this solution is 9 out of 10.

I worked with SAP products including BPC, SAP HANA, SAP BW for HANA, and Business Objects.

We are on Azure Cloud. Our BW system is on SAP HANA Cloud and our S/4 is on the HANA Cloud itself. We have real-time reports from S/4 that we actively use.

The performance is very good, and the container can be scaled up and down based on requirements. We have multi-tenant cloud for Dev and Prod and Dev Q, while Prod is a single tenant which gives us much more flexibility from a cost perspective.

Let me give you a couple of examples. We have something called FRPP which is a government-mandated report. Generally, if it is a load and do process, it takes a lot of time to get the data consolidated. But in a real-time instance, users can make changes to characteristics based on mandates immediately and see how the report looks and what the pitfalls are. This reduces a significant amount of time from that perspective.

There is no load time at all. Users get their data immediately, and we have deadlines for these complex reports. Giving a percentage of time savings might not be accurate. It depends on the perspective. If your perspective needs real-time data, then it definitely makes sense. If your perspective is not to get current data and is more focused on analytical reporting, then it's a different consideration.

Currently, we don't have any AI-driven features, but that's something we are exploring. SCC is one of the computers, and we are looking into Machine Learning and predictive analytics from the user-base perspective.

Regarding SAP HANA Cloud, one significant pain point is the lack of access to the database from the HANA Studio for developers. HANA Studio allows us to work with tables, whereas with SAP HANA Cloud, there isn't direct visibility of any tables.

Documentation is another concern. There isn't much documentation compared to what we used to get in the past, including best practices. In the last few years, their documentation has not been up to the mark at all.

We have been using the solution for more than 10 years now.

Our Basis administrators indicate there are numerous firewalls and reverse lookup processes in between, creating a whole bunch of complex infrastructure requirements.

It's a complex setup that is not straightforward.

The scalability is the best feature it has.

The support experience depends on the level of support you have with SAP. During cutovers, management took Tier 1 support, which is pretty good. However, getting messages answered otherwise can take weeks. We cannot classify everything to be very high priority.

Positive

The organization has been using SAP from the start.

The implementation took almost three years to go from Dev to Prod.

The implementation involved approximately five Basis administrators and other functional and development teams, totaling easily 100 people.

We are in the government sector, which has a more structured approach. We are aligned based on mandated requirements, which might not be relevant for private industry where changes happen more drastically.

As a developer rather than a Basis administrator, I can share that we are completely cloud-based with no on-premises solutions. The biggest benefit is the container capability. Previously with on-premises, securing the infrastructure was the biggest hurdle, but with cloud, it's much more robust as we don't need to worry about those aspects.

We have RPA, though I'm not part of that group. Everything is integrated into GRC, with no individual systems. All business rules are maintained in GRC, making it tightly integrated and controlled.

I would rate SAP HANA Cloud nine to ten out of ten. The overall solution rating is 10 out of 10.

This particular organization uses SAP HANA Cloud across everything in the procurement chain and inventory management space. It includes finance, supply chain management, and HR. It is quite a significant undertaking.

The solution has integrated many different value chains across the organization, as previously there were multiple systems managing those value chains. It has provided a more wholly integrated view of the business processes and data, which has been positive. Having access to all information in one space has been beneficial. The enabling of workflows across all different value chains has also been positive.

As far as the product is concerned itself, there aren't too many challenges. From a UX point of view, there could be better improvements in the user experience and how users interact with the system. Because not everyone is knowledgeable in the way SAP HANA Cloud operates, a more intuitive interface would probably be a high priority, along with something that is configurable.

The solution has been in use for probably a year.

They are still evolving their understanding of it because it is fairly new to them. It is hard to say how successful or unsuccessful it has been because they still use SAP BODS, the Business Objects Data Services, to do a lot of ad hoc reporting. The SAP Analytics Cloud piece seems to have worked fairly for end-users.

There are two parts to the service experience. The outsourced service provider's expertise and responsiveness has been good to date. There are multiple types of service providers in the SAP HANA Cloud space for this organization. SAP themselves, in the Australian context, are pretty responsive.

Positive

I have worked with other products in the past but currently I am working with SAP HANA Cloud.

The implementation was not straightforward because it is a complex organization with multiple modules implemented. Getting it into the cloud was not difficult, but the implementation itself was complex.

We have not explored alternate solutions.

The implementation definitely takes months to complete.

The organization has over 1,000 users.

The approach has always been to go back to a more standard solution as opposed to a highly customized one. There is flexibility in the product, but the way that the organization has decided to govern and manage the product has been more rigid.

I work with the client itself, which is a government agency, so there is limited information I can provide.

I have experience with the SAP Analytics Cloud.

On a scale of 1-10, this solution rates a 7.

I use Business Application Studio (BAS) within SAP HANA Cloud. There is a lot of information I need to gain because I have only created tables replication and calculation views. There are many aspects we need to learn. To view the data, we need to open another web page, and to design the calculation view, we need to open another address. It is a little bit confusing, and I need to learn more about that.

The real-time analytics in SAP HANA Cloud is very helpful. We can create dashboards using live data. In BW, we cannot create dashboards with live data. Using SAP HANA Cloud, we can replicate the data into HANA and use live data, which improves our business decision-making.

Without connecting VPN, I can access Business Application Studio, which is particularly useful. If I connect to one client using VPN, I cannot open another VPN, but with SAP HANA Cloud, I can open BAS directly.

SAP HANA Cloud is very flexible. It is very easy to build any kind of models. The platform offers great flexibility in terms of managing changing workloads.

There is limited documentation on how to use SAP HANA Cloud. There are many options available, but I don't know how to use them due to insufficient documentation. Feature-wise, I have only replicated SAP tables, not legacy systems, which I need to explore further.

The pricing for SAP HANA Cloud is very high. I am concerned that many BW clients are leaving BW on HANA and S/4HANA and moving to other solutions because of the high pricing. Any SAP HANA implementation is very expensive.

The technical support from SAP is inadequate. We don't get timely responses, with support tickets taking more than 25 days to process. They hardly respond even after multiple follow-ups.

Neutral

I'm currently working on BW, and some clients have already moved to other solutions. While I haven't worked directly on Azure, I have helped the Azure team by providing documentation data flow. They have created Azure data flows using our BW models and have moved to Azure and Power BI.

I need to become more acquainted with SAP HANA Cloud as I haven't used all facilities available. I cannot comment on the machine learning and AI features as I haven't explored them yet.

Regarding hybrid deployment capability, I can confirm that not requiring VPN for accessing certain controls is beneficial.

I would rate SAP HANA Cloud 8 out of 10.

I have been dealing with both SAP HANA on-premises and SAP HANA Cloud. I take part in the deployments of SAP HANA.

The best features of SAP HANA Cloud are that its software is effective because it has tight integration between other functions, such as finance, materials, and sales. That is what SAP is known for. By bringing in cloud, the main idea is to bring innovations faster. Because many new products such as Ariba and Coupa are bringing innovation faster, SAP is trying to push customers to be cloud so they can implement these changes more quickly. As they become a tool, they can perform numerous automations, which are only available if you are in the cloud.

I see some weaknesses in SAP HANA Cloud regarding innovations, as they take their own time compared to what the market brings in with new features. In general, SAP comes with some time lag. This might be because they want to test and ensure they bring it more robustly, but that is the known story of SAP.

I have been working with SAP HANA for a long time, six years, closer to seven years.

The deployment process can be straightforward or sometimes complex, depending upon how complex your business is. We have done some standard fitment to some companies. In some companies, if their business process is very complex, we have to customize extensively. It depends upon how the business runs.

I would evaluate their technical support as always good. SAP support is consistently reliable. I would rate their support four out of eight.

Positive

SAP is no longer giving on-premises licenses; they are only selling RISE. The real-time analytics features have been overused. This has been their selling point since five or six years ago.

The machine learning and artificial intelligence features are brought in as part of SAP tools. These capabilities currently help as SAP Jewel is being used for AI, ML, and GenAI. This is the current trend and talking point where we are doing some exploration.

With all these AI and ML capabilities being consumed, SAP is robust in their fundamental transactions. If they can bring those features into their fundamental transactions where key users or end users can build their own features or reports, that would be something interesting to see.

For example, when end users create a PO, create a PR, or do a goods receipt, if they need improvements, they have to go through a bigger IT cycle. They must provide requirements, then someone has to develop it, and then return it. If key end users could write a functional specification GenAI based on the specification, and if the GenAI could develop a prototype tool that they can test and deploy, this would be beneficial for the future.

I rate SAP HANA Cloud nine out of ten as a product.