Embrace - I love you!

It has always been difficult to do business with SAP together. Sharing has never been SAP's thing. Naturally, many consultants and partners have become rich through SAP.

In the context of a joint appearance, however, SAP still shows very idiosyncratic ideas of fair sharing, which was the case under ex-CEO Professor Henning Kagermann to ex-CEO Bill McDermott.

Now there is the program "Embrace". Now everyone is supposed to love each other and share fairly. The overriding goal is "cloud computing". SAP wants to give the impression that it is irrelevant into which cloud the inclined existing customer moves his on-premises installation. So much altruism from Walldorf?

Divide et impera, that may be what comes to mind when looking at the illustration - but this "divide and rule" is meant quite differently! And SAP has understood this quite excellently for many years.

What does Wikipedia say?

"Divide et impera is a figure of speech; it recommends splitting a group to be defeated or dominated into subgroups with conflicting interests. The purpose is to make the subgroups turn on each other rather than stand united as a group against the common enemy."

With "Embrace", SAP is not only embracing its friends, but also awarding very different tokens of love, ultimately creating a heterogeneous scene: At SAP TechEd, the company celebrated an eleven-year partnership with AWS; it let its own cloud executive, Rob Enslin, move to Google; and it signed a $70 million cloud licensing agreement with Microsoft.

Public partnership has always been a different approach at SAP than operational sharing in the background. And these sharing mechanisms are not limited to cloud computing - see indirect usage: For years, SAP motivated its partners and existing customers to customize their own add-ons and Abap modifications.

When the volume was large enough, SAP took the cudgel of "indirect use" out of the bag. Existing customers were allowed to keep their add-ons if a large chunk of license payments went to SAP.

A similar situation is emerging with "Embrace": After winning over the big hyperscalers for Hana and S/4 with the harmless-sounding program, SAP is coming onto the market with its own cloud ideas that are unsettling partners and existing customers.

It seems as if "Embrace" is a marketing program for the cloud, funded by SAP partners, while SAP tries to realize the real business for itself in the next step.