How to engage in SAP Cloud Computing as an Experienced ISV

You are a company specializing in making or selling software, designed for mass or niche markets. You made a successfull track with happy consumers and clients during last 15-20 years. Or you are working in such company as a developer or an executive. You were very happy with the trends and technology that you were in. However things are changing dramatically in last 2-3 years.

Trends are changing, consumers / customers are changing, demands are changing, and finally technology and offerings are changing, as an ISV you need to build your strategy, set up your framework, prepare your infrastructure (if you can afford), train your team and start to convert your existing products. Main challange here is lack of time, you can not try too many options, you have to hit the target at one shot.

First things first: Before transform your business, you need to transform way of thinking. Please take a look this game-changing articles:

Empathy Lines the Path to Simple and 5 Questions to Avoid Wasted Time by Bill McDermott

Digital Transformation, Part 1: Rapid State of Change Digital Transformation, Part 3: The Building Blocks Digital Transformation, Part 2: What makes it disruptive? by Sven Denecken

Now, you made your mind and ready to engage the new world. Your strategy is set and your team is established. At this stage you need to make a decision:

Will you offer some new on-promise solutions to your existing customers or will you offer new solutions to the whole world?

First options is seems easy to start and get some results, however this might helps to get extra 2-3 years before you will be forgotten unfortunately. Follow the second option, be sure that SAP has very good offerings for you. Please read these two articles, this will clear many blur areas.

The VOID that is PaaS and Use Cases for the HANA Cloud Platform

You do not need to invest on premise in order to be the part of this wold. SAP is offering Paas, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform: please have a look this documentation:

Please do not waste any more time and just join the new world. It fun and easy to start development, please have a look this document SAP HANA Cloud Application Development Scenario End-to-End Tutorial created by Jens Glander

Finally, there is more place for ISVs in SAP Cloud offerings, you are all invited, please join 

Cheers,

@sarhanpolatates