Bipolar disorder

The vacillation between cloud computing and own data center is justified and logical: Many parameters from the areas of business management, organization, technology and licensing law have to be considered and evaluated.

Today, no existing SAP customer goes to the cloud because it is "cheaper". The IT and ERP world is sustainably complex, so that a reduction to the capital employed falls far short.

Sustainably complex: An SAP installation is not a pony farm, and a release upgrade is not an expensive adventure vacation. Those who decide in favor of S/4 and Hana are not only deciding in favor of a new ERP including a database platform. New questions and tasks arise from these decisions.

Officially SAP does not talk about it: AnyDB - Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL-Server etc. - was and is for R/3 and ERP/ECC 6.0 only a better file system for storage and backup of ERP data.

Oracle, IBM and Microsoft can do more - but they were never allowed to prove it in the SAP environment. Hana is a highly complex and extremely powerful database platform with numerous engines and processes.

In terms of database technology, Hana catapults the existing SAP customer from the IT Stone Age into the near future, including bipolar disruptions: Large Hana database instances can also take several days to restart after a crash. Data scientists are absolutely thrilled about the "real-time behavior" of a Hana database and never want to work with anything else.

Officially, SAP is not talking about it: The ERP group has not carefully completed its homework in the area of "in-memory computing databases" and has marched off with Hana far too early.

For many years now, it has always been the same scenes on the Sapphire stage in Orlando: Professor Hasso Plattner justifying his invention and presenting new findings and techniques. This year it was "Persistent Memory" from Intel.

A Hana server with persistent memory can shorten the restart time after a crash from hours to just a few minutes - the SAP community is rejoicing! Other construction sites still exist: Hana 1 or Hana 2 including numerous version updates.

A Swiss contact from the SAP community wrote me that I was exaggerating my Hana phobia! He could organize a switch from AnyDB to Hana in a few weeks for a few thousand euros at any time. That is correct!

Beforehand, however, the plagued existing SAP customer must evaluate which Hana version he may, can and must switch to. The technical version change may no longer be a problem. But what happens when the budget is tight, the performance requirements are high, and the SAP banking app is due for customizing?

"Banking" is only released for Hana 1, and until recently only HP's expensive Superdome was certified for Hana 1, excluding the outdated Hana appliances. Here, SAP's Hana offering has another bipolar disorder.

Hana and S/4 on-prem or in the cloud? For SAP CEO Bill McDermott, an easy and quick question to answer: Cloud First!

A CIO at a large retail company once invested heavily in his own data center. Hana came up and stumbled. Fortunately, the trading system was not yet productive, because it took more than a week to restart Hana.

The CIO's summary: If Hana, then only in the SAP cloud, so that SAP has to spoon out its own soup alone.

Even if Bill McDermott sticks to the mantra "Cloud First", his own offering does not seem to convince him completely: With the program "Embrace" he promotes and courts the hyperscalers AWS, Google and Microsoft.

Where to go with Hana and S/4, the unsettled existing SAP customer asks: To their own data center, to SAP, or to third-party cloud providers, because not only the three leading hyperscalers have pretty Hana offerings. The Hana cloud scene currently has a bipolar disorder, doesn't it?

The rift runs right through SAP: Numerous community members complain about SAP's very bipolar behavior in the "on-prem" versus "cloud" discussion. While after many years of successful R/3 collaboration, on-prem support for ERP/ECC 6.0 is still running smoothly and communication between existing customers, user associations and SAP is harmonious, many users experience exactly the opposite in the cloud: individuality is undesirable!

Cloud standardization makes life difficult for existing customers. SAP's contacts for modifications are hard to find. User associations are not being heard on cloud and integration issues.

A broad discourse regarding cloud integration and hybrid cloud is therefore not taking place. This bipolarity could soon cause many users to flee to their own data centers, because cloud computing is not cheaper.