Wood - Getting Started with SAP HANA Cloud Platform

We live in a time of accelerated change, in a world in which companies fight over market share on a global scale. In this competitive environment, its more important than ever for enterprises to focus on their core business, to differentiate themselves from their competitors, and to provide products and services that deliver immediate value to their customers. Software has become a key enabler to help companies adapt to changing market trends by both streamlining and reinventing their internal processes as well as empowering them to develop innovative solutions. As such, its up to us developers to lead this digital evolution and shape a world that is driven by software.

Having made a living as a software architect for more than a decade, I understand that developing enterprise software solutions is far from being a trivial task. Complex system landscapes, ever changing business requirements, and pressing timelines are not an exception, but the norm. Consequently, developers need first class tooling that supports them in their daily tasks and enables them to focus on their job: converting business requirements into viable software solutions.

This is the problem space that SAP HANA Cloud Platform addresses: Its a design and runtime environment designed from the ground up to empower developers to build, extend, and run next generation business applications in the cloud. Based on SAP HANA, SAPs in-memory technology platform, this Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering provides customers and partners with the comprehensive set of services and capabilities needed to efficiently develop business solutions for an increasingly connected world.

Nowadays, where everything from people (social media), to companies (business networks), up to individual devices (Internet of Things) are connected to each other, the cloud has became the catalyst for a global digital business transformation. Its the backbone of the mobile movement and the enabler for big data scenarios requiring lots of computing power. With SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP offers a cloud platform that enables developers to support their companiesand ultimately their customersto leverage the opportunities accompanying this transformation.

In this book, James, Krassi, John, and Riley provide a comprehensive overview of SAP HANA Cloud Platform and its related technologies and how they support companies to extend their business into the cloud. Based on their vast experiences gained as development consultants over the last decade, James and John are able to holistically address these aspects and cover both the business and the technical perspective. Their expertise is ideally complemented by the inside view provided by my colleagues Krassi and Riley, who both have been driving their respective topics internally at SAP. Together, their domain knowledge is second to none.

The book focuses on concrete development scenarios and as such primarily targets solution architects and developers interested in understanding how to develop software solutions that excel in hybrid IT landscapes comprising both on-premise systems and cloud solutions. Starting with a general overview of cloud computing and SAP HANA Cloud Platform, the authors move on to address everything from getting started, to key technologies, up to advanced topics such as developing extensions for on-premise solutions and cloud applications alike.

After reading this book, you will understand the full potential of SAPs PaaS offering and how to leverage it for your own needs. Moreover, youll be equipped with a great set of examples to kick-start your own development projects based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform. As such, I hope you enjoy reading through this bookand I ultimately look forward to welcoming you to the fast-growing community of cloud developers.