On-prem vs. cloud

SAP's existing customers naturally envisioned cloud computing quite differently than SAP now wants to realize - without an exit strategy and with a lifelong commitment. Here, too, the SAP community is experiencing a painful realization: SAP's cloud only is no longer up to date. Only hybrid models will survive, because nowhere is there an either-or decision, a black or white. The world is colorful, even if the Hana machine in our illustration is spreading black smoke.

Currently, the relationship management between SAP and the E-3 editor-in-chief is not going well. At the beginning of this year, an E-3 author took the liberty of asking how up-to-date Hana and S/4 were. An outcry went through SAP and the user association DSAG. Our author's phone shrilled very nervously for a day straight. It was a logical question that still has no answer: How contemporary are the Hana and S/4 applications at the end of customizing?
How contemporary is cloud only?

If things go well, a large part of the SAP community will be running productively with S/4 Hana from 2027. In some cases, it could also be 2030, by which time the "new" ERP S/4 will already be 15 years old. Currently, SAP has refused to make any statement about an S/4 successor. For a rudimentary ten-year plan, however, SAP must reveal itself by 2025 in order not to lose even more existing customers to cloud competitors.

Cloud, the great mystery at SAP: Under ex-SAP CEO Bill McDermott (see illustration), the Cloud only statement was given because he bought up one cloud company after another. There was a lack of both strategy and integration, but McDermott had exemplary mastery of the narrative and thus at least satisfied the financial analysts.

Professor Hasso Plattner was far-sighted in recognizing the danger of unbridled and uncoordinated cloud growth. He knew and felt it: Many existing SAP customers need and want a continuation of the successful SAP values - integration!

McDermott's successor, Christian Klein, listened to the signals from SAP's existing customers and, with a new and young Executive Board, began to clean up the legacy and construction sites of the past. And more and more often, the SAP community heard "cloud first" instead of "cloud only". A small but decisive shift in strategy. SAP was reclassified: Cloud remained the goal, but not with a crowbar.

The first SAP press conference in the new year again brought disillusionment: SAP CEO Christian Klein and still-CFO (Cloud Financial Officer) Luka Mucic again spoke of cloud only. This shift in strategy is doubly painful: on the one hand, SAP has no technical cloud computing expertise like AWS, Google or Microsoft, and on the other hand, SAP's existing customers hardly trust the rise to the cloud. A recent DSAG survey has once again confirmed that users are not convinced by the Rise with SAP concept. So without Rise into a hybrid cloud, but how and where?