Recently, things have been a bit quiet regarding HCI OData Provisioning (this is the service on HCP formerly known as 'Gateway as a Service'). Now, I have great news:
As of this week, a new version of HCI OData Provisioning is available on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) trial landscape.
What is HCI OData Provisioning?
To make it short, HCI OData Provisioning gives you a new, additional deployment option of exposing SAP Gateway services to SAP HANA Cloud Platform. You might also call it your "Gateway Hub in the Cloud".
What's new?
In this version we have reworked a few things:
- Destinations
Destination handling has been changed to work with the destinations created in the HCP admin cockpit on subscription level (Services > HCI OData Provisioning > Configure HCI OData Provisioning).
We have decided not to migrate the existing destinations, as we assume most destinations were used for test purposes only and did not want to import potentially obsolete destinations. So I would kindly ask you to recreate any destinations that you might have used before in the trial landscape. - Compatibility with SAP Fiori, Cloud Edition
We have made some behind-the-scenes changes to enable all the cool SAP Fiori apps running in SAP Fiori Cloud Edition, which is now available in a controlled availability program for productive usage. If you are a part of said program, we can make HCI OData Provisioning available for productive use already today. For details on how to join the "beta" program, please have a look at this blog post: SAP Fiori Cloud Edition is now available for Productive Use! - Frequent updates
We will now release updates to the HCI OData Provisioning service more frequently, potentially on a monthly basis. - User Interface
We have updated the user interface to be consistent with the general theme used on HCP.
Does this mean that SAP Gateway is obsolete?
No. Basically SAP Gateway consists of two parts: One part is the Gateway Backend Enablement that allows you to build and create OData services, the other part is the Gateway Hub to expose the Gateway services (see the Gateway deployment options). You will still need to use the Gateway Backend Enablement in the future for the OData service exposure. However, as of SAP NetWeaver 7.40 the necessary SAP Gateway components come preinstalled, so in many cases you are ready to use HCI OData Provisioning with your SAP NetWeaver system straight out of the box.
What is planned for HCI OData Provisioning?
We are working with full speed on making HCI OData Provisioning available for productive use for everyone. The current plan is to make it generally available (GA) by the end of Q1/2016. (However, please bear in mind that there is always some uncertainty about unreleased software and therefore these plans might change. 
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In addition to the use with SAP Fiori, cloud edition, there are some further cool use-cases planned on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform where HCI OData Provisioning will simplify your IT landscape setup:
- API enablement: If you want to enable your Gateway services as APIs, HCI OData Provisioning can be used in combination with SAP API Managemt on HCP.
- Mobile enablement: You might want to build some native mobile apps for iOS/Android/Windows Phone that require offline capabilities, or other mobile qualities. In this case you can use HCI OData Provisioning in combination with HCP mobile services.
- Custom UI development: Of course you can also use the exposed Gateway services on HCP to build your own Fiori-like UIs using SAPUI5 technology with SAP Web IDE.
Feedback
Of course, I am happy to hear your feedback on this new release so that we can further improve the service, before it becomes widely available for productive use. So please write a comment below, send me an e-mail or if you encounter a bug, please open a support incident in component OPU-GW-OD-FW.
Enjoy!
Björn