The primary use is to provide the product for use to our clients.
We do not have enough experience with the wider range of this product to evaluate this at this time. There is too much we have yet to explore.
Because we have been mostly testing the product and still have limited production implementation experience with it over the past six months, we have not been so heavily involved with Cloud Platform Integration because we mostly continue to use other solutions for current business projects. For that reason, we may not have a complete view of the product as to what needs to be included or improved. However, I am aware that one area that needs to be improved still is business tools integration. Another is the area of product data inserts.
It is a young product and we have been exploring it for the past six months.
I feel that the technical support is really good. For example, I experienced one situation with the Cloud Platform Integration where the production system went down completely. It was a critical situation for the business and they were losing financial transactions. I registered a support ticket to SAP immediately when I knew of the problem, and SAP restored their system very quickly. They were done within one or two hours, they had fixed that critical issue, and they had the client up and running again.
Their reaction to the critical issue is typical of SAP support. When they know it is a critical situation, they are able to focus on the issues and get them resolved quickly. It was two years ago when I faced that situation and obviously it was for a client using a different SAP product. But I expect that SAP technical support is as good as it was two years ago or better. In the Cloud environment, where they are really focusing now, there should technically almost never be an issue of this sort. According to the market trend, we are all moving into the cloud environment and in order to do that most of the businesses are using cloud integration platforms.
Because SAP is really focusing on the Cloud, they are enhancing the product offerings, they have a good technical staff and technical capabilities. They will continue to work to support the products. In that way, I feel the support for their products will remain quite reliable.
We used and continue to use this and other products in this category. Before this Cloud Platform, there was another Cloud from Dell called Boomi. I worked with that product for a while — long enough to gain experience. Over the past two years, while waiting for the SAP product to be released, I worked mostly with HANA Cloud Integration which had a lot of the necessary features available already. Later I saw Cloud Platform Integration from SAP would become available. Because I have been working with SAP products for many years, I expected that this would be a better product for me and that I would really like it just because it is from SAP.
Because the Cloud Platform Integration product has enough of the necessary business features available, I hope now that it will be used more widely and that it will really start growing in the market in the very near future. If it will do more functionally and sell to more users, the company will have more interest to develop it further and focus on it.
I'm not sure about the exact pricing because I do not really deal with pricing information directly. But it is my understanding and my experience that SAP's pricing is usually high compared to the competition. But this is also justified because they hold their products and services to quite high standards. If clients want quality, the pricing is always costly.
It is not really a competing product, but I have been using S/4 by HANA AIF (Application Integration Framework) for eight months or nine months. Mostly, I am dealing with a certain product integration process registration on HANA Cloud. I will be using Cloud Platform Integration along S/4 by HANA on the AIF Cloud. Not the pure S/4HANA, but only get into the AIF, Application Integration Framework.
The SAP Cloud Platform Integration is a really good pathway to integrate with the cloud. SAP started with the HANA Cloud Integration and then they changed that and now call it is Cloud Platform Integration. It is doing really well with its presence in the market.
But they are really still developing this product. It does not really have 100% of the necessary features available to properly service business clients. Even without that, the product seems to be competitive and is helping people a lot according to the market response.
SAP has improved their cloud offerings a lot in the last two years, but I am only using this infrequently because I'm still in the process of discovery and integration. I use HANA Cloud Integration. Now I'm just starting to look into the Cloud Platform Integration because I am focused on the same integration area.
SAP is quite a good company with good quality products. I am confident this product is really good for the customers' business in order to integrate their businesses in the Cloud environment. I recommend this product to anyone. This is a good Cloud platform and I already recommended it for many of my colleagues or customers who want to use integration in their businesses. SAP Cloud is a good product and the company has good business practices as well.
On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I can give the SAP Cloud Platform product eight-out-of-ten. It may really be a seven right now compared to other more mature products. I'm not very sure about this.
I am not rating it higher because we still need to gain more experience with the product before we know more exactly where it stands. When I am sure I know the features better, I might give it nine or even a ten.
But for a ten, they will have to make a lot of improvements. For example, a month ago we had a knowledge-sharing opportunity with SAP for my whole company about the Cloud Platform Integration. We got training from SAP about the platform and at the time we discussed possible improvements for the product. I think still they have a considerable number of things that need to be improved from the product side. But for sure they are going the extra mile to help educate users about the products and I am confident in SAP and I recommend SAP products.