Cloud first—cloud only
SAP’s year-long message of “cloud first” and “cloud only” has unsettled many existing customers on the road to S/4 Hana. Far too little has been done in recent years to work out the actual benefits of cloud functionality on a company’s own data center (on-prem), with an outsourcer or host, with a hyperscaler, or with SAP itself. For a long time, a political debate dominated the discussion: RISE with SAP was supposed to lay the groundwork for “cloud only”, but it did not pass muster. SAP had to correct course, which it did now in Leipzig, courtesy of the two board members Christian Klein and Thomas Saueressig.
SAP S/4 Hana Cloud, private edition, customer data center
Surprisingly, SAP has faced reality: there are SAP offerings for public, private, and on-prem clouds. The product “SAP S/4 Hana cloud, private edition, customer data center” was developed jointly between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SAP to provide a cloud service answer for all SAP customers who want to use with S/4 in their own data center or with a host or outsourcer.
The result of last week’s cloud discussion is a heterogeneous but open concept that allows plenty of leeway for every possible challenge. This puts existing SAP customers on safe ground with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) because there should be no obstacles on the path in the future. Flexible and dynamic use of cloud functions will thus become possible at all levels of the SAP stack.
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