SAP’s cloud offering – now ready for industrial deployment

While SAP has been variously described as both ‘investing’ and ‘seeking customer feedback’ on its cloud computing strategy to date, the company’s insistence on its ability to ‘leapfrog current software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings’ by 2014 has arguably worn a little thin by now given the general maturity of the industry…


Attempting to answer previously critical judgments relating to its Business ByDesign and ‘Line of Business’ on demand software offerings, the company has used its TechEd user education symposium in Las Vegas this week to detail some of the mechanics behind the services it is now actively bringing to market.

Speaking directly to CloudPro, SAP’s senior VP of solution marketing Jeff Stiles suggests that momentum has been growing and that his company is still on target to rack up 1,000 Business ByDesign customers by the end of 2011. SAP Business ByDesign exists as both an integrated business application for core business functions to support finance, HR, CRM, supply chain etc., as well as a platform in its own right.

"Our cloud strategy depends on our ecosystem of partner connections as they can now use the Business Suite, Business ByDesign Studio SDK and HANA platforms to extend our reach in this market,” said SAP’s Stiles. "We are now paving the way for custom-built native applications to be created with industry-specific extensions. Business ByDesign now offers 35 end-to-end process-specific applications for real industrial-grade business use cases."

Crucially, this element of the SAP cloud portfolio is just one modular block of its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) level technologies. Beside this section of the stack (in terms of platform-level building frameworks) sit Business Suite (the ERP, SCM, CRM etc. solution formerly known as SAP R/3) and SAP HANA, the company’s high-performance analytical appliance.

Below this PaaS level, SAP provides its Virtual Cloud Manager technology at what is effectively the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) level. This is described as a route to helping existing on-premise customers gain value from cloud computing efficiencies by providing what SAP calls “virtualisation transformation services”. Appropriately then, above IaaS and PaaS we come to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) where SAP is providing its ByDesign and ‘Line of Business’ applications, as well as a set of personal productivity tools.

“Yes, we have been criticised in the past for taking our time with our cloud offering; but we needed to ensure that we could support customers across their entire business infrastructure and, quite frankly, we wanted to get this right before we aggressively took it to market,” argues Stiles. “The SAP cloud with a capital C is what we will be talking about next, as our offering is now starting to command global attention.”

So where next for the SAP cloud? Will industrial-grade deployments of Business ByDesign actually manifest themselves and start to substantiate the company’s claims and assertions?

"Our target areas for Business ByDesign are SMBs and what we like to define as the ‘subsidiary market’. This sector is important to us because this size of company typically needs to achieve seamless integration with a corporate headquarters unit, so a cloud offering makes more sense (and is a lower cost) than a traditional more static solution,” said Stiles.

SAP’s cloud position may yet to be fully defined and the company’s on demand SaaS level technologies are surely best described as ‘still ramping up’ at this time.

But, given the global software player’s staunch efforts to enhance and expand its HANA in-memory computing offering, there is surely some aptitude for engineering excellence at work here. Whether SAP can fully transition its work ethic to cloud technologies still remains, at least in some part, to be seen.