Vendors portal on HCP - users and licences

[jakub_pl]

Hello experts,

I would like to create SAP based Vendor portal.

Assumptions:

- External users access (self-registration, invitations, etc)

- Easy user and roles management

- Simple apps, that exchange data (specific to each vendor) with SAP back-end system.

I reviewed available solution and best match is Portal on HANA Cloud Portal. We have some experience in Fiori apps development, what is additional advantage. Portal access can be granted to external users using SAP Cloud Identity, but we don't want to buy SAP licences for each portal-user - that is why in specific apps there should't be any next logins. I assume that this can me made by setting BasicAuthentication in destination configuration.

My questions:

1. How to propagate portal userID when oData service is consumed using the same user for all vendors (from dest. config.) - to return e.g. orders for one vendor only ?

2. Are there any legal / licence objectives to use single user for back-end communication ?

I'll be grateful for any answer / link.

Kind regards,

Jakub

[Murali_Shanmu]

Hi Jakub,

I had a similar requirement few weeks back. I am not sure if this is possible as there could be license implications. Each of the vendors would be ultimately accessing the data from your SAP backend system and hence there could be a requirement to have a named user for each of them in the backend system. Please check with your SAP account team with the licensing aspects.

Cheers,

Murali.

[Former Member]

In my opinion, B2B and B2C scenarios should be the sweet spot for HCP adoption at this early stage of the products maturity but they only work from a technical perspective - licensing limits their feasibility.  Traditionally, it has been difficult to deliver these sort of solutions with previous SAP technology for both technical and license reasons so whilst HCP has solved lots of the technical challenges, the licencing side is still not 100% correct.

SAP really need to consider this when packaging up HCP licenses for use in B2B and B2C scenarios.  With older tech, there was a NetWeaver license package that effectively allowed for non-named users to interact with backend systems but this general area has always been a problem.

I can see technical and architectural ways around this challenge that involve replicating data to the HCP persistence layer and only allowing the B2B or B2C users to update that within a custom app, then requiring the existing named users of the customer to complete the updates back into the core ERP system but it is messy.  However what you save in licenses might be offset by what you would have to pay for database storage!

Cheers,

G.