Last week I had the opportunity to go to SAP Palo Alto to see SAP’s strategy on Cloud, Mobility and In-Memory. Thanks Mike Prosceno and Stacey Fish!
I am not going to write much about it as it has already been quite well covered by the following BLOGs:
http://andvijaysays.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/sap-needs-a-better-cloud-and-platform-story-and-a-good-...
http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/hcm/blog/2012/09/19/sap-briefing--cloud-mobility-and-hcm
The message about Cloud strategy presented by SAP needs some work. In my opinion it misses the biggest reason why customers look for cloud solutions in the first place. Customers do it as a way to simplify their landscapes and abstract from the technicalities of the platform. This is quite well highlighted in the following BLOG post:
http://blogs.sap.com/cloud/2012/07/17/why-i-dont-care-about-cloud-computing/
“it just works"
So, any attempt to describe cloud strategy focusing on its technology aspects will fail. Of course platform details are relevant, but they are secondary.
My point of view is that SAP needs to focus its Cloud “pitch” on its cloud offerings, its SaaS products.
And with that in mind, what I consider the most clear and compelling Cloud offering is SAP Business By Design. It is a functionality rich ERP solution run completely on the cloud. All the technical aspects of its implementation are simply hidden from the customers. Multiple separate software units, loosely coupled together in a multi-tenant environment powered by HANA. “It just works”. It is very easy to identify its value.
However, this solution has been getting very little attention these days. In fact, SAP’s Cloud strategy is said to be focusing on its “4 pillars”, that being “Money”, “People”, “Customers” and “Suppliers”. Where is ByD on this? In fact, the answer is surprising, but 2 or 3 of these offerings are built on and leverage a lot of ByD functionalities.
So why is so little said about ByD? I just believe it is a problem of focus.
