The new cloud business: storm clouds

The winners are AWS, Google and MS Azure, which earn real money through scaling effects and global presence. The winners are many special-interest cloud providers who are generating huge margins in the niches they have defined and built themselves.

In between, there are many would-be cloud providers, some of which include SAP. But storm clouds are gathering on the horizon, because almost all cloud providers are lacking employees, consultants and partners!

The congruent number of AWS, Google, MS Azure and SAP partners is negligible. For every existing SAP customer, the move to the cloud is an almost unmanageable risk because there are too few trained experts and consultants. Google has ambitious plans in the SAP community.

The only known German/French SAP partner is currently suffering from intensive staff turnover and will probably be out of action for the first half of the year.

MS Azure, which already has to share an SAP partner with Google, is no better off. AWS can at least convince with unrivaled prices, but it also lacks qualified SAP experts and consultants.

In view of the cloud know-how deficit, every existing SAP customer is advised against a quick move to the cloud with Hana or S/4. Verifying the storm clouds is easy when looking at current server hardware sales: On-premise seems to be getting a second chance as long as there is a lack of SAP partners for AWS, Google and Microsoft.