Expect a cloud boost from SAP’s new CIO - @_bgoerke

[richard_hirsch]

Early this week, a few tweets announced that Björn Goerke was the new SAP CIO. 

An official announcement followed a few days later.

As I reflected on Björn’s career move; I thought about the impact of this announcement on SAP’s broader Cloud strategy.

Björn has experience in two critical cornerstones of SAP’s Cloud business – he retains his position as the Corporate Officer responsible for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) and he was intimately involved with the development of SAP’s PaaS – HANA Cloud Platform – in his previous position as Corporate Officer responsible for Technology & Innovation Platform Core (TIP-Core).

With this technical foundation, Björn has the ability to promote increased cloud activities in SAP’s internal IT.  This appears to be his intention as well:

[SOURCE]

There might even be a new hashtag for this effort: #SAPRunsSAPInTheCloud

Although SAP IT already uses various cloud solutions (SAP Cloud for Customer, SAP Cloud for Travel, SuccessFactors, Employee Central (planned) etc), there is potential to push this evolution even more.  For example,  I expect more SAP IT applications to run on the HANA Cloud Platform.

My assumption is that many of SAP’s internal HANA-based SAP systems are already running in private cloud environments hosted by SAP.  Since Björn is still responsible for the HANA Enterprise Cloud, such applications might migrate towards the HEC but I don’t know if the HEC is just for customer environments or is also able to be used internally as well.  Such migrations would then be marketed as proof of the maturity / security of the platform

I expect a more aggressive marketing effort in this area with Björn acting as a spokesperson – this campaign will be directed at other CIOs who will be asked to look at SAP’s IT cloud-based efforts as proof that such activities are viable / valuable. Thus, I’d expect more promotion of the Cloud-related aspects of the SAPRunsSAP campaign. The advantage of Björn in such campaigns is that he can speak based on his long personal experience in various cloud-related roles at SAP.