A little over a year ago, during its Field Kick-off Meeting (FKOM) 2019 in Barcelona and Las Vegas, SAP announced that it was embracing hyperscalers like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. The program Embrace was supposed to incentivize SAP customers to migrate to these hyperscalers’ clouds. If they aren’t willing to migrate to SAP’s own cloud, at least SAP can profit off of their move in some way.
What happened?
It turns out that SAP customers are willing to embrace cloud as well – specifically Microsoft Azure. An exclusive contract between SAP and Microsoft keeps the momentum going. SAP partners like Deutsche Telekom rely on Microsoft Azure as well.
With this in mind, it is only natural for SAP customers to wonder: where are Amazon, Google, Alibaba or Huawei? They were part of the program Embrace, but they rarely get shown any love from SAP itself or the community.
For example, the DSAG investment report 2019 definitively shows which cloud SAP customers prefer. Microsoft Azure is their favorite. SAP itself is in second place, AWS comes in third. Other providers aren’t even mentioned in DSAG’s survey.
Why is Microsoft the winner of Embrace?
SAP customers are on the safe side with Azure. SAP and Microsoft have a whole ecosystem of joint partners as a safety net to fall back on.
AWS is interesting considering its price/performance ratio. Google seems to almost have given up – signs of life are sparse with some marketing campaigns far and few between.
If SAP wants to encourage productive and fair competition, it should maybe try a relaunch of its Embrace initiative. Impending challenges might be better solved in a group hug with Amazon, Google, Alibaba and others than in an exclusive partnership with Microsoft.
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