Customers and Partners Can Sell Innovations Built on Meta Data Framework

This week, I managed the Technology Track at SuccessConnect 2014 at Las Vegas. There were 9 sessions on topics such as integration, extension, cloud technology, mobility and security. I had the opportunity to closely work with customers, partners, product managers and solution managers who are experts on all the above topics. I also decided to actively moderate all the sessions and support the speakers by answering customer questions when I can.

One of the sessions was on Extending SuccessFactors using SAP HANA Cloud Platform, which is a Platform As A Service (PaaS) offering from SAP. Brian Collet from AspireHR and Abhijit Salvi from SuccessFactors presented on the topic. Brian talked about the US Benefits application AspireHR has built on the HANA Cloud Platform and showed a live demo of the product. Abhijit is the platform product manager responsible for the meta data framework. He talked about how SuccessFactors can be extended using the meta data framework and HANA Cloud Platform.

A day before the session Brian, Abhijit and I reviewed the content of the session at a coffee shop in the Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas. We discussed the difference between the meta data framework and HANA Cloud Platform. That is when Abhijit mentioned to me that customers and partners can build small applications using the meta data framework and sell those applications to other organizations via the SAP Store, the same way applications built on the HANA Cloud Platform are sold today.

I suspect that the technical details and the commercial details are neither well understood nor widely known at this time. Abhijit and I discussed that we should work on this once we get back to the bay area.