Think Hybrid, Push

Compared to some of its closest competitors like Oracle and Microsoft, SAP
has lagged behind in the cloud stakes. Even later start-ups like Google or
Amazon coming more from an Internet related background, has upstaged them. SAP
co-CEO Bill Mcdermott has been earlier on record that companies would never
trust their core business processes to software as a service; but things are
changing with CTO Vishal Sikka saying observers are dead wrong if they think SAP
does not care about the cloud.

Sikka, in fact, sees SAP's cloud strategy evolving over the next twelve
months into a mix of on-premise and on-demand business software running in a mix
of public and private clouds. Accordingly, SAP is girding its loin to deploy
more tools and services that will help enterprises manage their existing SAP
systems on a virtualized and cloud infrastructure.

The essence of SAP's cloud emphasis seems to be on hybrid infrastructures,
consisting of an internal cloud component and seamless access to external cloud
capacity as and when needed. This balanced approach of private and public clouds
is being officially touted by SAP as offering more choice to the customers.
Closer to reality would be the fact that SAP is driven more towards this being
relatively late in the cloud game; it is trying to aggressively emerge with a
private cloud strategy to embrace customers faster and make up some grounds, it
lost out to competitors.

The SAPPHIRE conference saw SAP re-emphasizing its cloud roadmap

SAP unveiled a plank in its strategy for private cloud computing at the
recent Sapphire summit with an announcement regarding its ERP software running
on the Vblock systems backed by Cisco, EMC and VMware. Vblock, announced last
year, combines servers, networking equipment, storage, management, security, and
virtualization components in a stack for building private clouds.

In fact, denim maker Levi Strauss worked with the vendors and consultants on
lab based tests that showed running SAP on Vblock could lead to cost savings.
Levi was a particularly apt customer for the companies to work with initially,
given the themes of cost savings and easier system management. While examples
like Levi is a boost for SAP's cloud strategy, SAP is clearly thinking beyond a
single customer while pushing its private cloud (and consequently hybrid cloud)
agenda.

SAP is naturally starting at a slight disadvantage as unlike Oracle or
Microsoft, it does not have its own virtualization technologies. That means, it
will try to every other method to offset the disadvantage. One of them could be
the Project Gateway, which is about enabling easier access and consumption of
SAP software from any device or environment (example, Ruby, Python, mobile
devices, partner applications, etc).

For example on the partner front, Duet Enterprise, a product jointly
developed by Microsoft and SAP, is using project 'Gateway' to enable Microsoft
SharePoint and Office users to connect to SAP applications. It also offers
Microsoft SharePoint developers a way to create innovative solutions through
easier access to data and processes from SAP software without SAP knowledge.
This looks to counter the market impact of what Oracle is doing with Fusion,
which is using middleware to cobble together various acquired applications.

With hybrid being the focus of this cloud strategy, the emphasis is on
additional orchestration and adding more capabilities as services to its core
systems like ByDesign. Think of it more as 'on-premise on demand'. SAP's
gameplan would be to weave in collaboration throughout these on-demand add-ons.
That allows it to sell on-demand software that maps well to a company's existing
on-premise application. The rub: customers that already have gone with SaaS in
addition to an on-premise suite may not swap out for on-demand orchestration.



Rajneesh De

Source:DQ