Services qualified for Cloud Credits on SAP Cloud Platform

[ralf_schaub]

Introduction to Cloud Credits and CPEA

In second half of 2017 our entire team responsible for the commercial foundation of SAP Cloud Platform had been working hard to make the transition towards a consumption-based commercial model a reality. Finally in January 2018 we were able to report "mission accomplished" and made the so called Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) and Cloud Credits available for our customers through our field representatives.

Dan Lahl's introductory blog for the new consumption-based license model was a soft starter to get the word out and we immediately received responses also from prominent influencers like DJ Adams first assessment a few days later.

I personally hope that with the introduction of CPEA and Cloud Credits we offer the flexibility customers wanted to have for quite some time. Cloud Credits allow customers to purchase an entitlement for all the services under the new model and adopt them flexibly and get charged based on the usage of the respective services.

Open for business

This week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we go broader with our external messaging. As visitors can see on the show floor and read in our press release, we make the Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement available in 5 markets as a starting point.



Additional markets are planned to be made available in the course of 2018. We plan to extend the model for end of Q2 to another 10+ markets. Stay tuned and follow our blogs to learn more once we are able to communicate about the market extension.

Included services

First question that typically comes to mind when a new model, functionality or service is introduced is - what is the initial scope? While the subscription model and consumption-based model will co-exist for the time being, not all services, that are available through subscriptions are also provided through Cloud Credits and the CPEA immediately.

As you can see on our newly designed SAP Cloud Platform landing page, we have a new actively managed services catalog that gives you the transparency for every individual service. Simply go to our website and have a look at the pricing which we offer to the market. As an example we take SAP HANA Service, Base Edition in our Data Management category.



Click  on "Pricing" and it will tell you the available rate plans and whether the rate plans are availalble for Subscription or also through the new Cloud Credit. You can also see in which data centers a certain service is available and what the rate for your local currency is. From here you can add the respective rate plan also to the estimator.



You can see, that the HANA service is available both for Cloud Credits and Subscriptions offering our customers the choice that fits them best.

If you add the service to your cost estimator, we also provide there the transparency under which model it is available through little icons "C" and "S" that are listed in the Estimation Summary as shown below. In the example you can see that SAP Fiori Cloud is only available through the Subscription model currently.



 

To make it easier for you, I have compiled the list of cloud services which are available as of today below.



The grey depicted services are already available since beginning of January and the colored ones are planned to be available by end of Q1 / 2018. With this scope, we can offer by end of Q1 (which is not so far away in reality) most of the heavy-weight use cases also through Cloud Credits.

 

Services roadmap for cloud credits

Overall - at SAP Cloud Platform - we are committed to provide an at par coverage for subscription license and Cloud Credits by mid of this year including the following services illustrated in blue color.



Well, transitioning the services into the consumption based model is a  continuous journey for us.

Disclaimer (you know us 😉 😞 As it is the case with all roadmaps and planning information, there may be changes that may delay or change the deliverable without any notice; so please take this into your consideration and check back frequently. In any case the services catalog gives you always the latest information of whether your desired services is available and under which license model.

What's ahead?  A continuous journey

As outlined above, we plan to equalize the services scope for our subscription and consumption-based offering by mid of the year. But the journey does not stop there. We continue to enhance the services portfolio with new developments out of our labs both from technical and business service perspective.

So, check back regularly in this community or just visit our SAP Cloud Platform Services Catalog.

Feel free to provide feedback on the services coverage and ask questions. We are more than happy to respond and take your feedback seriously.

[WRoeckelein]

Hi Mr. Schaub,

thanks for the helpful update!

What I am currently missing is information on how to purchase Cloud Credits? Is there a minimum upfront purchase? When purchased Cloud Credits are used up, in what increments are Cloud Credits automatically reordered? Can Cloud Credits which are left over at the end of the year/billing period/whatever you call it carried over to the next year?

Could you point me to a place with some information concerning these points?

Regards,

Wolfgang

PS Another question regarding application runtimes: What is the granularity? eg AWS and Azure bill by seconds IMHO. When using the application autoscaler this is important!

[qmacro]

Thanks Ralf, a useful update. I'm guessing there's a lot of plumbing to be done in the background so you can "just" flip a switch to turn on consumption based pricing, so thumbs up to the team that's working on that.

[ralf_schaub]

Dear Wolfgang,

for details on the boundary conditions for Cloud Credits I recommend to get in touch with our sales representatives.

The automatic re-ordering is not provided in case of over usage. As a customer you can purchase the top-up for the Cloud Credit at the same conditions as the existing contract. We plan to provide an easy way to purchase the top-up via the SAP Store in the course of 2018.

Carry over of unused Cloud Credit is not provided.

W.r.t. Application Runtime: We charge the used capacity (GB RAM) on a monthly basis and measure it internally on a daily basis.

I hope this clarifies it further. For more questions and answers please see our FAQ document that continuously gets extended.

[ralf_schaub]

Dear DJ, yes the team has been working hard to make this happen. We plan to provide a trade-in program for existing SAP CP contracts and accounts by mid of the year to offer our customers a way to take advantage of the new license model and ensure business continuity for the already deployed services.

 

[WRoeckelein]

Dear Ralf,

yes, your answer and the FAQ help a lot!

However wrt to Application Runtime this is still unclear to me: What do you measure on a daily basis, average GB RAM used, max GB RAM used or something different (the auto scaler could start and stop instances on a minutely basis!)? And how do you aggregate the daily measurements to the number for the monthly bill?

Also, if a customer uses a multitenant application of a partner and connects it to onpremise systems, he needs just an application router (and an opremise cloud connector) and an xsuaa service. What would the customer need for this (besides traffic cost, which btw I miss in the cost estimator) with cloud-credit-pricing?

[ralf_schaub]

Dear Wolfgang,

as mentioned we measure the used GB RAM on an hourly basis and sum it up for the day over the month. At the end of the month we build the average RAM usage over the number of hours and take this for the monthly charge.

We plan to change some of our rates to hourly rates by mid of the year to move towards a more accurate billing.

In case of a multi-tenancy SaaS application there is typically nothing required in addition as the license for  the SaaS solution contains all of the required metrics.