What does SAP want? AWS? HCP? CAL?

Officially, I'm still Head of CIO Group, but the feeling is that I'm Director of a flea circus.

"You have to accept pluralism and learn to deal with it".

says my wife and reports on her meetings in the cultural association.

"We also have a hierarchy with an association board, etc."

she explains to me lovingly and then brings numerous examples where the tail wags the dog.

In a nutshell, SAP's "innovations" are corrupting our planning.

About a year ago, the SAP community's call for an SAP roadmap was unmistakable. Many of my colleagues were also calling for binding development plans.

SAP did what the company always does in such a situation: it listened to its existing customers and produced and published countless roadmaps - quantity slays quality.

Since then, chaos has reigned. It seems almost impossible to consolidate these SAP documents, which number in the thousands. And the value of each individual document is extremely limited: Q2 and Q3 for 2017 are already a distant future, according to SAP roadmaps. How is a CIO supposed to deliver a binding 2020 IT plan to the board?

Even a regular visit to the Sapphires does not bring clarity. Once everything is supposed to go in the direction of Hana Enterprise Cloud (HEC), then the on-premise versions will be delivered preferentially again.

"Cloud first" does not, however, mean that SAP is placing an emphasis here, but merely that the cloud must bring in more revenue in the future.

Thus, HEC, HCP (Hana Cloud Platform) and CAL (Cloud Appliance Library) exist completely unsynchronized.

Until now I always assumed that SAP wants to lure existing customers with their licenses to their own cloud - then there are no more difficulties with NetWeaver Foundation for Third Party (indirect use). But now a Hana partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been announced big and loud!

And AWS is allowed to claim that the existing SAP customer will find the best and most powerful Hana cloud offering here. So what will become of HEC and HCP? What does SAP want?

During the AWS presentation, HCP was not mentioned with a single syllable, but CAL, which has been hushed up for a long time, came to new honors again. Apparently, the CAL framework can be found next to Vora on the AWS platform.

Should Amazon really be the better cloud for existing SAP customers? We have drawn up strict rules for cloud use, including AWS.

While it is a Herculean task for procurement and global project managers to create budget plans for cloud use, the Amazon service is valid and very helpful in many niches.

However, most projects are still a leap in the dark due to the variety of services and different prices worldwide.

Meanwhile, there are specialized agencies that exclusively offer and operate costing models so that ultimately a sound cloud budget planning is created. Needless to say, in all cases HEC and HCP are at the upper end of the TCO.

So SAP is bringing a powerful competitor on board in the form of AWS, and our SAP regulars are wondering what kind of strategy the Walldorf-based company is pursuing.

I don't have to think twice about moving my own licenses to AWS before I move everything - including my on-premise licenses - to the SAP Cloud.

For us, the private cloud based on a converged infrastructure is the only viable path anyway. Our global IT infrastructure was completed 18 months ago with the last European data center for the time being.

Dimension, scalability, agility and power requirements fit, so our converged infrastructure and private cloud has a safe harbor - and Gartner analysts strongly recommended three years ago that we never cancel our on-premise license and service contracts.