SAPPHIRENOW Madrid 2012 was not packed with announcements but with a very confident message that SAP is placing its bets on the cloud, although the path will be evolutionary not revolutionary. Where we blogged earlier that SAP had most of the building blocks in place, it still had work to do on the wiring. And that is exactly what SAP did, and a bit more.
The wiring is the launch of the new SAP 360 Customer Solution on CRM, packaging important elements like real-time, social and mobile into one solution. The CRM announcement is the first in a series of SAP 360 Customer Solution announcements.
SAP is grouping its cloud solutions into four pillars, helping customers better manage people, money, customers and suppliers and there seems to be a fifth one appearing in SAP Business. Each of these areas will contain best of breed cloud solutions. In addition SAP offers cloud suites in SAP BusinessByDesign and SAP BusinessOne and serves its larger customers with SAP Rapid Deployment solutions and solutions built on Netweaver.
Additional wiring is done through SAP HANA which has outgrown its database jacket and has morphed into the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. The HANA cloud platform offers SAP HANA application services as well as SAP HANA database services. It will be ‘HANA Inside’ if SAP gets its way. This will have its impact on the way SAP solutions are built, packaged and sold.
The work on the wiring seems to be bearing fruit, SAP reported $1billion in cloud revenues, generated among 20 million users with 6000 clients.
SAP’s messaging is coming together. The company is taking the long trail to the cloud. It will be on premise, hybrid and gradually cloud will takeover. SAP’s product portfolio reflects this transition, there are many routes to the cloud: development routes, SMB routes, Suite or best-of-breed routes. For a company that is aiming to take complexity out, it is still rather complex. But the building blocks are there, the wiring is done, and the SAP Cloud is ready for takeoff.
