SAP is developing a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product—NetWeaver OnDemand—that will allow customers to build custom applications in the cloud to complement and integrate with existing on-premise applications.

NetWeaver OnDemand is intended as a quicker, more cost-effective alternative to custom-developing applications on NetWeaver on-premise, or other platforms. SAP partners will be able to build and sell applications on the platform as well.

“The market is changing to an on-demand model, a platform that someone else provisions as a service and then customers go off and build applications on that,” says Sanjay Chikarmane, SAP’s SVP and general manager of Global Technology Solutions. “That’s the need we’re looking to address.”

NetWeaver OnDemand will go into ramp-up at the beginning of 2012 for use by a limited number of customers. SAP’s looking to make it as open as possible. NetWeaver OnDemand is meant to be a “multi-programming paradigm environment,” Chikarmane says. It will support multiple programming languages, including ABAP and Java, as well as popular frameworks such as Spring and Ruby on Rails.

For non-expert programmers, NetWeaver OnDemand also supports River — the programming model in development by SAP that allows end users to create light-weight applications using drag and drop tools.

NetWeaver OnDemand will be hosted by SAP, and the goal is for it to support HANA from its launch. Data from applications developed on NetWeaver OnDemand will be stored in-memory.

Over time, SAP wants to make it very easy to do other critical tasks on NetWeaver OnDemand, such as build and integrate mobile applications. Technologies from the Sybase Unwired Platform will be built into NetWeaver OnDemand, Chikarmane says.

Integration is a common concern when deploying SaaS applications. With NetWeaver OnDemand, SAP’s aiming to ease integration concerns not only with SAP applications but with non-SAP applications as well. In turn, NetWeaver OnDemand will use Web services standards for integration with non-SAP applications, such as REST.

“We don’t want integration to be a separate project as part of every SAP application,” Chikarmane says.

Specific pricing information isn’t available yet, though pricing models will align with the other Platform-as-a-Service providers, SAP says. Pricing will likely be by application, in terms of the underlying resources it consumes (such as CPU and memory,) as well as user-based subscription fees.

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5 Comments for SAP Preps Platform-as-a-Service Product: NetWeaver OnDemand

Jamie Oswald

Sounds great, but I’m not going to get my hopes up until I see it delivered and G/A.

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