Enterprise Cloud Services Try To Woo SAP App Clients

It was only a matter of time until enterprise cloud services, like Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, started pushing harder to get SAP applications (and their enterprise clients) on board.

Even though enterprise organizations have historically been slow to migrate to the cloud, there’s been a pretty seismic shift in consumer applications moving solely to the cloud, and it was inevitable that enterprise organizations would eventually follow suit.

Now, with SAP’s annual Sapphire conference earlier this year, enterprise cloud providers are pushing harder than ever to begin wooing large SAP applications and start snagging some of the massive $246 billion enterprise cloud market.

To be more specific, what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft enterprise cloud divisions are really after is the highly lucrative ERP market, which consists of many of enterprise organizations’ most complex and data heavy applications within enterprise IT. These systems are largely kept in-house currently, but snagging one of these accounts would be a major flag in the hat of any one of these enterprise cloud service companies.

It would also signal to other enterprise organizations that it’s safe to move forward with the cloud and push other organizations to do the same. And it’s likely that the cloud company that signs the first big ERP account will become the market leader – a huge deal with a potential market this large.

So, what have the three big cloud leaders been doing to let SAP and enterprise organizations know that they’re ready to take on their business?

Google, which was the slowest of the three to adapt to enterprise cloud services, has created a partnership for SAP to act as a data custodian on GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and has also integrations with productivity tools within G Suite.

Amazon Web Services has responded by adding Hana clusters (with up to 17 nodes) and expanded on its X1 instance family. They also announced recently that they’d be adding 16 terabyte instances to accommodate more SAP applications.

Microsoft’s Azure Platform has rolled out an M-Series VM for single-node configurations, and added support for SAP Cloud Platform.

With major cloud vendors proving that they’re ready to support SAP applications, it’s just a waiting game to see which one manages to convince enterprise organizations that it’s the right time to switch.