Cloudification is not simplification
In doing so, he expressed on the big stage what many existing SAP customers have already painfully experienced. The path to the cloud is one of many successful operating models, but it is not a sure-fire success, cost killer or problem solver.
In the SAP environment, the path to the cloud can hardly be mastered without experienced partners. And the example of SuccessFactors shows that SAP itself is still a long way from mastering cloud computing:
SAP promises an availability of 99.38 percent for SuccessFactors, which corresponds to a downtime of about four and a half hours per month. According to Steffen Pietsch, this already not particularly outstanding value has been exceeded many times in the past!
Because cloudification does not mean simplification, many existing SAP customers prefer a hybrid model - but here too, SAP has too many construction sites: In his DSAG keynote speech, Steffen Pietsch criticized the inconsistency between on-prem APIs and cloud APIs.
Strictly speaking, S/4 on-prem and S/4 in the cloud are two very different worlds. At this year's TechDays in Mannheim, the DSAG Chief Technology Officer also called for sustainable harmonization - but SAP still has a little time until 2030, doesn't it?