In what it says is an attempt to put developers in the front seat of its in-memory evolution, SAP has launched a HANA sandbox for them to develop and test in-memory scenarios and content with their own data.

Invitations have been sent to 200 developers, but SAP’s getting ready to support as many as 10,000 on the sandbox within a couple of months, says Anne Hardy, SAP’s VP of Platform Evangelism and Developer Adoption.

While areas such as SAP education have employed similar approaches to launch programs, providing a public sandbox on this scale is pretty much a first for SAP. And SAP HANA is just the first SAP software users will be allowed to try out in such a manner. SAP will expand the sandbox offering to include other “new innovation” areas such as mobility and NetWeaver Gateway down the road—a road, according to SAP’s David Brutman, that will enable developers in new ways.

“It’s a big goal for us to re-gravitate the focus on developers and developer enablement,” says Brutman, senior director of the SAP Developer Program. “Think about the sandbox as the offering for HANA as the first step. We’re removing barriers to help developers access our technologies and get real, hands-on experience.”

To host the sandbox, SAP has rented space in a public data center: Bay Area Internet Solutions (BAIS) in Santa Clara, Calif. Boxes are shared by multiple users, with varying levels of isolation done in some cases. Developers access them through a virtual image that contains all of the tools they need to play around on HANA. This is provided by CloudShare, a vendor that specializes in providing virtual development and test environments. Once a developer requests the HANA sandbox, an image of HANA Studio is generated for them to connect to the HANA database. They log into that image and can develop based on guided exercises, Hardy explains, as well as come up with their own development ideas.

Hardy’s team is also working with the HANA app cloud team to set up sandboxes for that as well. SAP is still drafting its licensing terms for the HANA sandbox; users accessing the sandboxes now have test and trial licenses.

Developers who have accessed the sandbox have been pleased but, of course, haven’t been shy about providing feedback.

“People are quite happy that we gave them access to HANA; for most developers, it’s not accessible at all,” Hardy says. That said, users have requested changes to the tools in the client systems, as well as additional content scenarios.

In turn, users have asked SAP to provide additional data, because data loading is quite difficult at this point. Uploading data requires users to first upload it to the cloud and then to HANA, which presents data latency issues. SAP’s working to make this easier.

“HANA becomes interesting when there is a lot of data on it,” Hardy says. “They want to push HANA to the limit. We have to help them do that.”

Share This

• 
• 

1 Comment for Calling SAP Developers: Care to Play in the SAP HANA Sandbox?