Over the last 12 months or more SAP has been busying itself with all manner of cloud developments and acquisitions (see here and here for our analysis and further links.) This has been good to see but the overall strategy remains opaque. Heading into the Sapphire Now event this week, cloud questions are sure to be high on the agenda.
They will be fuelled by the news that SAP’s Business All In One suite has been certified for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Certification has been extended elsewhere too with additional certification for SAP’s Rapid Deployment solutions and SAP Business Objects business intelligence applications.
The question is whether this represents a shift towards Amazon for SAP - and away from Microsoft’s Azure cloud for public cloud offerings. As we are on the cusp of the Sapphire Now opening events it would be pre-emptive to call this one but it does add another question to the list for SAP. Last year SAP announced it would be supporting Azure and had plans for .NET integration but there has been little activity.
The two clouds are different, with Azure more of a PaaS offering and Amazon tagged as IaaS. However, Microsoft is making SharePoint and SQL Server available on Azure so is moving towards IaaS. Let’s not forget HP and its recent announcement of the HP Converged Cloud, its delivery approach and portfolio that will span traditional IT, private, managed and public clouds. A public beta of the IaaS aspect launched on May 10 2012. And IBM is an active and serious cloud participant too.
When the extended SAP certification is viewed against that background it starts to look like more a positioning play between public cloud providers than SAP making a statement of intent. We’ll keep you up to date once Sapphire gets underway.