What needs improvement with SAP Cloud Platform?

Allowing more third-party applications to be integrated into the cloud platform would make it easier for customers to adopt SAP Cloud Platform. Additionally, the inclusion of AI capabilities out of the box would be beneficial given the global movement towards AI and machine learning.

The pricing is too high across all SAP products relative to resource utilization. SAP charges are approximately two and a half times higher than if we were to host an on-premises version on the cloud ourselves. Any downtime for an ERP platform is unacceptable as it affects the entire system. The fundamental issue is that every department gets affected by the downtime.

The product's support team has certain shortcomings, not from the solution's portal perspective but from the back-end side. If something is in progress, I see that there are multiple dependencies with different teams, so the visibility over the incidents will not be available. If you raise an incident with the tool's team and there is a dependency of one team over the other, the visibility of the incidents is not available to users. Major challenges with the tool stem from the fact that with a large volume of data, we cannot process everything in SAP Cloud Platform. Higher volumes of data or ETLs cannot be handled on SAP Cloud Platform. Such is the kind of product SAP designed on the cloud. There is an alternate approach to managing large data, which includes transferring files. SAP has some other ETL tools as well if you have a huge volume and major data transferring required. You can use separate ETL tools to transfer data, but it is mostly not for huge amounts of data; it is more for orchestration. If you want to do orchestration on the data, you can use it. SAP has an on-premises legacy tool named SAP PI/PO. For better migration, there are a lot of things SAP needs to do. SAP had already come up with some solutions, but all of them were immature. If enterprises are moving from an on-premises environment to a cloud-based one, and some organizations have to do it because they have reached the end-of-life phase for the products they have been using. In SAP Cloud Platform, compatibility with migration should be easier and handy, but this is not currently available. Tools are available from SAP, but they are unsure how to handle certain solutions.

The solution's document management system on the cloud is a bit slow, and document uploading takes time.

They are pushing towards the public cloud, and such a transition requires a mature understanding of the company's business processes. With the public cloud, there will be less flexibility to customize anything. I tried one of the public cloud solutions with tax factors; there is almost zero flexibility. You have to follow the standard mostly without much room for customization. It's about the cloud service, and there is no room for customization or adapting the system to a specific process on the cloud. Easy integration with very common services worldwide, such as Microsoft Office 365, requires more attention from SAP to facilitate and simplify the process. SAP should make it easier to integrate with such systems as SysTrack.

Regarding improvements, I think the user experience, specifically the developer experience during design time, could be better. Platforms like MuleSoft and Flowgear have much better design times.

The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required. The solution's technical support's ability to respond to calls and resolve queries are areas where improvements are required.

I've observed a few bugs in SAP. One recent bug I found in Content Modifier is that when using a predefined header to call the current date, it prints the previous date. These are small bugs I found.

Planning features are limited to the finance module. Planning features for other modules must be improved. We have to purchase separate components to cover the production, procurement, and pay cycles. Ideally, everything should come into one bucket. We should not have to buy two products to plan for production and finance.

The tool's UI is not very intuitive for cloud integration, so it needs research to understand its options and how it may work. SAP Cloud Platform is built on a framework named Apache Camel, and they have continued with that to date, which may make it seem not the easiest version of the tool. As a user or a developer, Apache Camel framework in SAP Cloud Platform may not seem like the easiest tool to build as the process may not seem to be very intuitive. The UI of the tool is not intuitive. Right now, if I compare SAP Cloud Platform with Dell Boomi, I would say that the latter provides a far more beautiful and intuitive view compared to the former.

The product needs improvement for serverless native integrations. They should opt for serverless features as all the customers worldwide choose cloud-based products.

What I would like to see improved is the learning curve. It is not easy to train someone on SAP CPI. Also, when it comes to different partner systems, especially front-end customer experience systems or mobile apps, CPI doesn't seem to be the best fit, especially in the context of customer experience systems, content management, and mobile apps.

The main area that requires improvement in the SAP Cloud Platform, specifically within BTP, is cost management and application stability. We also face challenges with load balancing and other related issues. Currently, we leverage the review of business applications and data usage within our organization. CTI has proven to be an excellent choice for integration, making it seamless and reducing the complexity of various integration scenarios. However, the major area that needs improvement is the development model for custom applications on BTP. SAP has introduced a low-code model that enables application development with less coding and more focus on data and visual building. However, migrating existing applications from traditional coding methods, such as HTML or other programming languages, to the low-code model is not straightforward. It is time-consuming and involves reviewing the application model, which may discourage businesses from investing in this transition. Additionally, there are various requirements and layouts that need to be considered, which further complicates the process. Many businesses are hesitant to invest in this area as it involves significant effort and may result in data loss, especially when personnel change within the organization before requirements are provided. It's an area that requires attention. It becomes challenging for developers to understand the business logic and requirements, making it difficult for the team to work on application migration and transition. Moreover, SAP has released a publication regarding the migration to VMware Cloud, and compatibility issues have arisen. This affects the seamless migration that SAP promotes, as there are thousands of objects that are not compatible with NetCloud. These objects are critical to the business, and without them, the transition cannot be successful. Technical complexities and the difficulty of migrating one application to another create significant obstacles. Businesses lose interest in such migrations due to the time and technicality involved. While the technical team understands the complexities, the business side is primarily concerned with using new features and staying up-to-date. This discrepancy becomes a major bottleneck, making the transition from one location to another extremely complex.

I think the public cloud has a lot of room for improvement. The private cloud is working well, but the public cloud has room for improvement. Speaking about the public cloud, it's a very rigid system. So, there is not a lot of customization possible in a public cloud environment. I think the current version of the system is very strong. I think it has pretty much all the features which were needed. So it is, and it's a very new one. So we'll have to really see how customers are able to use the solution.

The price of the solution could improve.

The areas I think this solution should improve are monitoring and adapting. In the next release, I'd like to see features like alerting.

The pricing for the SAP Cloud Platform has room for improvement because it's higher than the pricing for other applications. I found AWS more scalable than the SAP Cloud Platform. I want to see better pricing from the SAP Cloud Platform in the future. I also want more security and scalability from it.

From what I understand, the SAP Cloud Platform is for implementation on AWS or Azure, and it's not meant to be a full-fledged cloud solution, so while using the platform, an area for improvement is that it has fewer offerings and is less flexible when compared to AWS. AWS has a lot more flexibility than the SAP Cloud Platform. I've also used Azure in college and AWS in between, and I prefer AWS over the SAP Cloud Platform. The only reason I would ever stick with the SAP Cloud Platform is to create applications integrated with SAP or with other companies within SAP, such as SuccessFactors. When you go into the SAP Cloud Platform web page, it's a bit bland and has relatively limited offerings. For example, there doesn't seem to be in-house MongoDB support, but I realize there's in-house support for the PostgreSQL database, so there are fewer offerings in the SAP Cloud Platform. Yes, you can always go for a database on the actual MongoDB server rather than depending on the offerings of the SAP Cloud Platform. However, it's still better to support MongoDB from the platform, so payment is consolidated, rather than going to a different location to make a payment. Another room for improvement in the SAP Cloud Platform is the need to create an SAP subaccount if you need to use the platform unless you have an SSO login by Google or if you're using a different identity provider such as Microsoft or Google. Instead of requiring dependency on SAP, it would be good if users could use the SAP Cloud Platform even without a subaccount on SAP. For example, when hosting an application on AWS or Azure, you don't have to create an account in Amazon or Microsoft. You can still do it using Google. You can use almost anything, so I'd like SAP to improve by removing the dependency, particularly the requirement to create an SAP account to use the SAP Cloud Platform. In the next release of the SAP Cloud Platform, it would be exciting to see more in-house support for many new features, similar to what AWS or Azure offers. It could be different types of systems instances, though that could already be there, so I'm unsure about that. Including MongoDB support on the platform similar to what's offered on AWS would be great because I use MongoDB a lot, and I've even used it for personal tasks, so I'm a bit biased. For example, in AWS, you can have a MongoDB system with 750GB and limits and calls per month. It would be nice if MongoDB support is available in the SAP Cloud Platform.

It would be helpful to have additional samples for SoapUI that include interface methodologies and templates. New developers might have some difficulty with the platform.

In person, when the development happens, we were told that it's flexible and customizable. However, sometimes, it's challenging to customize. Maybe this is how the feature works. That's the only thing I have noticed that’s a problem for us. When we try to implement it, we realized that "Hey, this feature is not working or is not here.” We thought some were basic features. However, if you don't see the features you were expecting, you get disappointed. Some features are still under development even though we've been told they are available. When we implemented it, we realized they were still not there.

The addition of more industry use cases would be an improvement. SAP could also try to make it more open-source, which would encourage community growth among developers, product owners, and the support team.

I can’t speak to features that may be missing.

When I started looking at the client's IT architecture, I started by doing a study of their services, DVM, data volume, and management services. According to the results, they could be a lot better at this. We’d like the product to be like a web service and allow us to download an application on the computer to operate the systems.

In the planning area, IBP is there, however, with IBP still, there are a lot of customizations we need to do. There are integration areas we need to improve, and IBP processes also. IBP is a little bit of a closed process. If you see the SAP product span, there are so many cloud versions. It is good as an add-on, or to plug in all of them. If that was possible, to plug them all together, that would be good. When it comes to giving a license BOM, there is so much confusion about that. For example, why there are so many items added to that? They could simplify it a bit, or create one cloud product instead of three or four different licenses. They can eliminate more than 20% or 30% of the BOM component, which currently SAP is doing as a separate line item. Reporting is confusing. There are three or four areas. One is the 4HANA SAP, then BPC reporting. It's too much. The customers do not have that much knowledge in order to choose for themselves the best way to approach reports and so they are getting confused. At least in the near future, they have to start standardizing the way S4 is standardized now. When they innovate too fast, they end up confusing their customers.

The current pricing model is credit-based. We would like to have more information about the usage of the existing applications. That could improve. Recently, SAP has introduced login, more of a free trial where you can trial and error, so you can try something without paying any subscriptions, so that's good. So similar, more applications can be hosted on free trial so that people can try them first, and then if they like it, then they can go for it.

The main problem is that there aren't any easy migrations from SAP PO to SAP CPI, so from process orchestration to cloud platform integration. The connectivity requirements, not only with the SAP environment but also with third party systems, are not fully fulfilled. The re-uses of the know-how from the process orchestration can be used but aren't fully used.

I'd like to see more local integration.

For our organization, the price is the main downside. They should work to reduce the cost. This specifically affects small companies who would like to use it. The solution should work to simplify its offering to make it more consumable for users, especially new users. The solution requires more flexibility overall. I understand that in the future, they will be offering open source ERP, which will be quite useful.

This product needs a lot of improvement and should be simplified. It is really clumsy. You need a lot of connections running just to get it working. Even though it is a private cloud, we need a lot of connection speed and resources. I would have preferred something on-premises which would have been very simple. But that is our use case: programming and hosting it on our web solution. And that is all. I would personally like to see a lot of examples of how to do things with the solution. This is a scalar platform and they are providing some solutions. There are some applications available that you can activate from cloud connectors, et cetera. That is good. But I need to see examples of what some use cases are and I need to be able to build some applications. It is not just about how can I utilize this platform, but there should be step-by-steps. For example, in step one, I need all my connections in place. Well, I also need to know also what kind of connections. Second, I need to know what my data should be. Third, I want to know how I can use a simple auditor. These can be very simple examples for different features. It would be helpful. If you go to some other platform tool sites, they are loaded with examples and templates, et cetera. I think that part of the presentation of this solution is missing here. It is as if they are saying that even from the start I had to know everything about how the product works before I ever used it. That is frustrating at times. Instead, it is always like a game of trial and error to see if something is working or not. That is time-consuming and very frustrating.

One thing that can be improved is the way the license is set up. If it could be defined by specific types of users then it would be better. For example, if it could be divided into three different sections, one for management who don't require the analytic work, it could be more for viewing. Another could be for the design department, which would require more specific tools, and finally, developers for the architecture. Different types of licenses would be very good. In the next release, I would like to see improvements with the price and the licensing. We are struggling with our vendors to find out who did the tool implementation.

We need to connect our ERP solution via the VPN. We need to make sure our ERP solutions aren't exposed to the outside world. Our teams really struggle with this.

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.

The functionality of the interface can be difficult. Usability is a challenge most of the time and not being able to get all of the information. Security, authentification, and logs need to be improved. In the next release, I would like to see better navigation, better usability, clearness, and better integration with new technologies.

I would like to see more and better support for data transformations. A transformation is able to change data from one format to another format. In the current solution, pivoting data or dealing with multiple levels of transformation is not supported. Those options are missing.

We would like the ability to create our own flexible data type, directly in the system. This is functionality that is available in the older, on-premises version, but not available on the cloud platform. Our current workaround is to create the definition and import those features. If this functionality were available directly then it would be a big plus because as it is now, it requires a lot of effort. Better connectivity to on-premise systems would help us to support older systems that are migrating to the cloud. This would give us more confidence in telling clients with old legacy systems that SAP has the capability to handle their landscape.

The source controller needs improvement. There are some disadvantages to it. Versioning also needs improvement. I would like for it to have integration to GitHub.