Skip to main content

Google and SAP - A Marriage in the Clouds

Google and SAP - A Marriage in the Cloud
Google and SAP - A Marriage in the Cloud
On Mach 8, 2017, SAP and Google announced another marriage in the cloud during Google’s Cloud Next event: SAP HANA is certified on Google’s Cloud Platform GCP, and is generally available now. SAP Cloud Platform and more products and solutions are to follow.
The Google Cloud Launcher marketplace will be utilized to offer and deploy to and for customers and partners, starting with SAP HANA, express edition, which is already available, too.
Further topics that are covered by this partnership are
·      Improving Google’s containerization technologies for enterprise workloads
·      Security, privacy, and integrity of customer data in the cloud. As part of this SAP software shall act as a data custodian (NB: How that works in legal and political environments remains to be seen) and joint solutions for access control, governance, risk and compliance shall get developed
·      Integrate Google’s G Suite into SAP applications. This has already been implemented for Identity and Access Management.
More on the still fuzzy side are end-to-end integrations and collaborations in the areas of AI and machine learning.
True to the SAP mantra of being an ecosystem player this is all about choice – choice for the customer to implement what is best for them.

My Take

Another interesting one!

Good Win for SAP

SAP now covers all major cloud platforms. HANA is now certified on AWS, Azure, and GCS, apart from running in the SAP cloud. With this SAP now has the broadest footprint when it comes to running on an IaaS platform.
With the SAP Cloud Platform being available soon there also will be a very powerful PaaS solution on one of the strongest IaaS.
It is interesting that there is no mention of the legacy software (SAP Business Suite) at the moment, although with HANA running on GCS it should be possible to migrate a Business Suite installation to GCS – as long as it runs on HANA – in near future.
Another interesting aspect is that in the productivity arena there are a few overlaps between the G Suite and SAP solutions – think SAP Jam vs. Google Hangout. How easy will it be to use Hangout instead of (built in) Jam in future? Is that interesting for Google at all?
However, far more interesting are the allegations of future potential: Bernd Leukert explicitly mentions end-to-end business processes and machine learning with some next announcements to be expected at the next SAPPHIRE NOW. For SAP this is where the real juice is: Like Salesforce and Oracle their CLEA solutions predominantly rely on company internal data and lack the far reach of external data. This is where Google (and IBM Watson) step in by their ability to contribute relevant insight from the outside. So, this partnership essentially closes a gap between SAP and Microsoft – while giving an edge above Salesforce,who just announced an AI partnership with IBM Watson, which on top cannot be expected to be targeted towards CRM types of applications as well.
Lastly, GCP provides an ideal bed to run and scale IoT applications with their expected throughput- and scalability requirements.

What about Google?

Google gets an industry heavyweight to provide load on their infrastructure. Especially, if existing on-premise customers can get incentivized to migrate from their still predominantly Oracle-based instances to HANA based GCP instances; this can become a big one, as there are still tens of thousands of these instances available. Think the joint effort into containerization here …
And the availability of SAP HANA Express Edition and soon the SAP Cloud Platform should drive a good number of developers onto the Google cloud.
Additionally, it gives Google the opportunity to penetrate a Microsoft fortress: Microsoft Office is still very much a synonym for productivity apps in Enterprises.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, the AI angle. Business AI needs both: Insight from inside the company and from outside the company. Vendor owned and driven AIs have a hard time delivering this. With the notable exception of Microsoft. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Baidu, Twitter,… and some specialized on business intelligence sit on an asset that enterprise software vendors desperately need. So, these might be the secret winners of the enterprise software clash of the titans.
So, overall there is a big gain for Google in Enterprises looming.

And the competition?

There is a fight for dominance going on in Enterprise software. With Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP here are four main tribes. In general terms of enterprise software this partnership gives SAP some more headway against the strong competition, especially if SAP also gets their ecosystem strategy implemented somewhat better – they still are fairly hard to play with.
On the CRM side this tack brings them closer to Microsoft and Salesforce.
The race goes on.

Last but not Least: The Customers

All around good. Especially as it seems that this was a customer driven (Colgate Palmolive) innovation. SAP offers most choice but also needs to offer some guidance when it comes to choosing. Given that SAP or their implementation partners deliver this guidance, there is considerable gain in this partnership: Additional competition in infrastructure, more possibilities in productivity, and so on.

For customers it all boils down to being enabled making the right choice.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

SAP CRM and SAP Jam - News from CRM evolution

During CRM Evolution 2017 I had the chance of talking with Volker Hildebrand and Anthony Leaper from SAP. Volker is SAP’s Global Vice President SAP Hybris and Anthony is Senior Vice President and Sales GM - Enterprise Social Software at SAP. Topics that we covered were things CRM and collaboration, how and where SAP’s solutions are moving and, of course, the impact that the recent reshuffling in the executive board has. Starting with the latter, there is common agreement, that if at all it is positive as likely to streamline reporting lines and hence decision processes. First things first – after all I am a CRM guy. Having the distinct impression that the SAP Hybris set of solutions is going a good way I was most interested in learning from Volker about how there is going to be a CRM for S4/HANA. SAP’s new generation ERP system is growing at a good clip, and according to the Q1/2017 earnings call, now has 5,800 customers with 400 new customers in the last quarter alone. Many...
2 comments
Read more

How to play the long game Zoho style

The news On February 7 and 8 2024, Zoho held its annual ZohoDay conference, along with a pre-conference get together and an optional visit to SpacX’s not-too-far-away Starbase. Our guide, who went by Chief, and is probably best described as a SpaceX-paparazzi was full of facts and anecdotes, which made the visit very interesting although we couldn’t enter Starbase itself. The event was jam-packed with 125 analysts, 17 customer speakers, and of course Zoho staff for us analysts to talk to. This was a chance we took up eagerly. This time, the event took place in MacAllen, TX, instead of Austin, TX. The reason behind this is once more Zoho’s ruralization strategy, transnational localism.  Which gives also one of the main themes of the event. It was more about understanding Zoho than about individual products, although Zoho disclosed some roadmaps. More about understanding Zoho in a second.  The second main theme was customer success and testimonials. Instead of bombarding us with...
1 comment
Read more

Reflecting on 2023 with gratitude - What caught your interest

A very happy, healthy and prosperous new year to all of you. This is also the time to review my blog and to have a look what your favourite posts of 2023 have been. With 23 posts, I admittedly have been somewhat lazy in 2023. Looking at the top ten read posts in 2023, there is a clear clustering about a few topics, none of them really surprising. There is a genuine interest in CX, ChatGPT, and vendors.  Again, this is not a surprise.  Still, there are a few surprises in the list! So, without further adoo, let’s hear the drumroll for your top five favourite posts on my blog – in ascending order. After all, some suspense cannot harm. The fifth place gets claimed by my review of ZohoDay 2022 – “ Don’t mess with Zoho – A Zohoday 2022 recap ”. Yes, you read that right. This is a 2022 post. The fourth place got claimed by another article on Zoho, almost one year younger: Zoho, how a technology company reimagines business software . It is a reflection on the Zoholics 2023 conference ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Salesforce stock tanks after earnings report - a snap analysis

The news On May 29, 2024, Salesforce reported its results for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2025. Highlights are a total quarterly revenue of $9.133bn US, resembling a year-over-year growth of 11 percent a current remaining performance obligation of $26.4bn US a remaining performance obligation of $53.9B US an operating margin of 18.7 percent. diluted earnings per share of $1.56 The company reported a revenue guidance of $9.2bn - $9.25bn US for the next quarter and a full year guidance of $37.7bn - $38.0bn US, resembling growth rates of 7 – 8 percent and 8 – 9 percent, respectively. With these numbers, Salesforce ended up at the lower end of last quarter’s guidance on the revenue growth side while exceeding the earnings per share projection and slightly lowered the guidance for the fiscal year 2025. The result: The company’s share price dropped from $272 to bottom out at $212. The bigger picture Salesforce is the big gorilla in the CRM and CX industry. The company has surpassed ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zoho - A True Unicorn

End of January Zoho held its 2020 Zoho Days, an analyst summit, which I was happy to attend, along with more than 60 colleagues, as the only analyst from Germany, as it seems. Sadly, it took me quite a while to complete this – Zoho deserves a faster commentare. But hey, let’s look forward and get rolling. Zoho is a privately owned enterprise software company that has quietly evolved from a small software company in 1996 to an ambitious global player that serves the SMB- and enterprise CRM market with cloud applications. The company has a set of 45+ business apps with more than 50 million users, 10 data centres and counting, and is available in 180 countries. The company is profitable and maintained a CAGR of more than 30 percent over the past five years. But why quietly? Because Zoho managed its growth pretty unusually (almost) fully organically with only very minor acquisitions. Crunchbase lists one. Following this unique approach, which defies the tradit...
2 comments
Read more