Cloud: The New Back Office?

Recent challenges have made working from home an imperative almost everywhere. If companies decide that working from home is a reasonable, efficient alternative, then staff’s homes could become the new front office while the cloud becomes the new back office.

There are many good reasons for an on-premises datacenter and against the cloud. However, there are some companies who have already migrated their ERP systems and other applications to the cloud, and if their staff then also have adequate internet access, it becomes easy to let marketing, sales and administration teams work from home.

Different story for SAP (cloud) customers

Despite all the colorful Fiori apps, working from home is not easy for SAP customers. For too long, SAP has invested more in how it would look than what it could do. The overall SAP infrastructure is unfortunately still not cloud ready. Fiori is not yet efficient or quick enough.

SAP’s Q1 2020 financial results show a decrease in software licensing revenue by 31 percent compared to 2019. It’s still too early to decide if this decrease can be attributed to more and more customers opting for cloud deployments, or if it means that customers choose other vendors over SAP. Regardless, SAP should improve its cloud solutions and make sure people working from home can use Fiori as efficiently as they’d normally use their SAP ERP systems.