Cloud first yes - Cloud only no

DSAG Chief Technology Officer Steffen Pietsch postulated right at the beginning of his keynote:

"With unprecedented speed and force, digitization is changing working life."

Digital services and technologies are an increasingly differentiating part of the value chain - and as a result, the success of many companies depends on their IT competence.

The use of cloud technologies plays a decisive role here. Some members of the audience do not seem to have felt entirely at ease with this analysis, as the mood was wait-and-see and reserved:

Didn't many hyperscalers and SAP itself promise that by using cloud technology, existing customers would be able to reduce their own IT expertise and thus save resources?

"For many new investments, the cloud is the right thrust. But not all applications and all data will move to the cloud - and certainly not just for the sake of it."

DSAG Technology Director Steffen Pietsch is convinced.

"Cloud first yes, cloud only no"

is therefore his credo.

For many companies, the cloud represents access to innovation, scalability and elasticity, as well as a shift in operational responsibility that does not correspond to their own core competence. The DSAG association is convinced that the public cloud is a strategic growth market with great potential for many providers - including SAP.

However, the market trend is moving in the direction of hybrid/multi-cloud and many existing SAP customers are again recognizing the value of "on-premise" - also because in-house IT expertise is and remains necessary anyway. However, this only results in a cost advantage for the large hyperscalers and not for the "expensive" HEC (Hana Enterprise Cloud).

But at the same time, there are some hurdles to overcome, Steffen Pietsch also admitted in his DSAG keynote: Many companies have invested massively in SAP software and its customizations and pay high maintenance fees for the on-premise portfolio.

Therefore, they also expect older products to be fundamentally further developed and legal requirements to be implemented. Before a switchover, the respective cloud solutions must be functionally advanced or at least equivalent to today's on-premise world.

Nevertheless, Steffen Pietsch believes the path to the cloud is the strategically right direction. To master the complexity associated with a hybrid system landscape, automation, integration and quality are crucial for him.

To achieve a high speed of innovation, it must be possible to develop and implement new solutions quickly. And changes to existing systems and processes must be able to be implemented quickly.

This requires that SAP solutions can be operated in an automated manner throughout. Test automation, security checks at configuration and code level, and comprehensive monitoring are particularly important.

"Overall, I still perceive the support of the SAP standard for end-to-end automation of development and operational processes to be too low"

says Steffen Pietsch and adds:

"I would like to see much more universal solutions or solution modules that pave the way for companies to move into the cloud. Be it by means of further developments by SAP or by integrating solutions from the open source community."

The Chief Technology Officer also criticized the lack of uniform object definitions, because it is not acceptable that the "business partner" object is not defined and created in the same way in all SAP applications.

SAP is transforming itself from a development house to an operator of cloud solutions and platforms, thus creating completely new quality requirements that Steffen Pietsch is not yet aware of at SAP. SAP's cloud strategy is changing the requirements of existing customers.

Whereas user-friendliness, freedom from errors, and completeness used to be the central buzzwords in an R/3 world, today they are additionally scalability and elasticity, stability and availability, self-services and automation, as well as best practices, reference architectures, and training concepts that are designed for fortnightly releases instead of annual innovations.

And of course, the participants also discussed the topic of "breathing systems", because SAP has still not presented a flexible licensing model that can be scaled in all directions.