SAP Cloud Strategy

What is SAP Cloud Strategy?

SAP has both financial and software targets behind their medium and long-term cloud strategy. Their financial target, as initially announced during their Q3 earnings presentation in 2020, involves achieving €22 billion in cloud revenue by 2025. From a software and technology standpoint, SAP is looking for customers to adopt cloud-based solutions for all their SAP applications. This may simply involve using cloud-based infrastructure such as that available through SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud or with the hosting capabilities of RISE with SAP, or could involve using an entirely cloud-based application such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

What is SAP Cloud Strategy?

SAP has both financial and software targets behind their medium and long-term cloud strategy. Their financial target, as initially announced during their Q3 earnings presentation in 2020, involves achieving €22 billion in cloud revenue by 2025. From a software and technology standpoint, SAP is looking for customers to adopt cloud-based solutions for all their SAP applications. This may simply involve using cloud-based infrastructure such as that available through SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud or with the hosting capabilities of RISE with SAP, or could involve using an entirely cloud-based application such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

SAP Cloud Strategy is focused on allowing customers to choose their provider while SAP offers and manages the cloud services. This is particularly true with their RISE with SAP offering where there is a single contract with SAP for the services and their management, but organizations choose who their hosting and implementation partner will be. SAP has close relationships with all of the major public cloud providers, typically referred to as hyperscalers, but there are many other hosting partners and cloud providers who are SAP partners and offer cloud services.

Further Resources for SAPinsdiers

SAP’s 2022 Strategy Focuses on Cloud ERP and RISE with SAP. Although SAP has had cloud targets in place as their 2025 objectives and has been reinventing itself as a cloud company since the late 2010s, their focus has shifted towards moving customers towards cloud ERP—software-as-a-service solutions like SAP S/4HANA Cloud—and RISE with SAP. This article explores what SAP has announced and their 2022 strategy focus.

Enterprise Cloud Deployment 2021 Benchmark Report. More and more organizations are moving SAP workloads to the cloud, with 88% of respondents running at least one workload in the cloud. Many of these workloads are solutions like SAP Success Factors, SAP Concur, or SAP Ariba which are entirely cloud-based, but there is also an acceleration in moving workloads like ERP systems to cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Success Requires a Clear Vision. The primary focus of organizations moving to the cloud is around reducing costs, increasing flexibility and scalability, and deploying applications more quickly.  However, taking the time to understand what you are trying to achieve with your move to the cloud is an important step that organizations don’t always complete. This article talks about the steps that you can take to ensure that you’re having the right conversations ahead of your move to the cloud.

Moving to the Cloud is About More Than Infrastructure. Although initial cloud deployments focused on infrastructure, there has been a shift in the business case behind why organizations are moving to the cloud. Effectively utilizing data should be a key consideration when moving to the cloud as this is the most valuable asset your company has. This article discusses how business cases are changing, and how you should be looking at your cloud provider as an innovation partner in addition to the other services they provide.

Vendors offering cloud services for SAP include: Atos, AWS, Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, HPE, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, Navisite, NTT Data, Nutanix, Rackspace Technology, Virtustream, and VMware.