IBM Cloud Foundry vs. SAP Business Technology Platform

IBM Cloud Foundry is a solid service from the IBM Cloud platform. It is easy to learn, and does not usually require you to make drastic changes to your existing applications. It is especially good for new applications that are cloud native, or micro-services, that can be easily updated and deployed. With its blue/green deployment, you can achieve 0 downtime for your customers.

Incentivized

SAP Business Technology Platform offers to run the cloud application without worries about availability and accessibility. This is helping us to enable the services that are really suited for us. For example, We have Cloud Identity Services that offer the capability to manage identity directory and also Identity provisioning functionality. Both functionalities helped us to manage the SSO and also enabled the auto-provisioning.

Incentivized

• Intuitive user interface makes it easy for anyone to use, regardless of their professional background.
• A lot of the services integrate well with external platforms, APIs, and programs, not just IBM services. A lot of the competitors in this space lack this ability.
• Maybe it is just our contract in particular, but support and help is always made available.

Incentivized

• Authentication options - In the past, we needed to really leverage our own solutions for MFA and other security measures, but now, out-of-the-box these options are really good and readily available.
• Ease of use - the interface has been adjusted to be really easy on the eyes but also simpler, less convoluted, and really well thought out.
• Modernized SAP experience - compared to the old stuff, SAP is really modernizing all of the experiences. The new house style is rejuvenated, and the company is really becoming more likable compared to 10 years ago!
• SAP Discovery and Missions are a real treat to see what the upcoming costs are!

Incentivized

• Sometimes the API Connect GUIs don't cleanly disengage after attaching models or updating schema and it is hard to know what has been written successfully and which (if any) models or tables were missed. I shouldn't have to manually check through a list of 377 models to find the ones in and out of a list on either models, folder or database tables. Printing a summary even in logs which did a "diff" sort of thing between 'task-set' and 'task-completed' (referring to attaching models or updating schema as tasks here as 'tasks').
• Provide access to Postgres Database in Sydney datacentre for Australia.
• Clearer documentation around setting up a secure (referring to SSL and certificate setup here) server on eg, chubby1.au-sydney.mybluemix.net.
• Allow a ramp in pricing onto the Blockchains. We will not be able to afford it until quite a few years into production, even if we launch successfully.

Incentivized

• The almost mandatory use of HANA services to run CAP applications. It would be best to provide extensive support for other databases.
• The subspace landing page/cockpit is not so user friendly. Provides a lot of information and usually is hard to find where things are.
• Downtimes should be shorter.

Incentivized

Seamless integration with external system and dashboard to monitor the data flow and analysis are very essential for the business. The way the product is designed and modelled lead to minimum business disruptions. Adopting to the new and modern technology was easy. Keeping the central system as clean and adopting project bases development are advantages.

Incentivized

Overall, I feel it is build toward as an SAP centric platform. Which is very proper direction for SAP as it is their competitive advantage. However, as a customer, I like to see the cost of the services to come down with the advance of underlay hardware capabilities. Licensing model can be streamlined for easier budgeting and consumption.

Incentivized

I give it 9/10 because its customer support team is responsive and knowledgeable, providing clear guidance on complex issues. We contacted them several times; I want to give one example. When we had a problem with third-party integration, we reached out to them about the issue, and they provided a tailored solution for this.

Incentivized

Training material in Developers Community or from Learning hub are really good... also most of the time we route through Discovery center... so materials provided by SAP is really good.

Incentivized

1. Sometimes the licensing doesn’t make sense, e.g., Difficult to understand the license for ABAP cloud runtime. 2. When SAP Business Technology Platform workflow cost is very high but process automation which offers more features has less cost.

Incentivized

IBM Cloud Foundry is our first choice industry-standard platform as a service (PaaS) which has always provided us with quicker, simpler, and more consistent ways for the deployment of the cloud-native applications which in result saved us lots of time and money.

Incentivized

SAP Business Technology Platform is easily connectable using standard solutions to the onpremise backend SAP systems. Services can be linked with each other and with SAP systems in a managed and secure way, while with the other products getting the data, access and networking done is cumbersome. Also we can make sure to have all cloud environments in the same region using the multi cloud approach wich reduces latency problems.

Incentivized

• This was the founding solution used to allow us to move in to and test out a cloud pipeline. This is what paved the way for a full production cloud solution to be possible.
• Having Cloud Foundry at the base of our development and sandpit environment, segregated away from our standard on premise solution has moved away red tape and ensured an agile way forward.

Incentivized

• Spending time to develop the application idea and visualize first before jumping to SAP Business Technology Platform and initiate development
• Take the time to test and validate architecture and data flows for the potential application or process to be developed on SAP Business Technology Platform
• Conduct regular assessment of usability, effectiveness of process turnover

Incentivized