SAP’s overarching strategy is to deliver business value to our customers via the Intelligent Suite. This is a next generation business suite that leverages HANA and SAP Cloud Platform (together called the Digital Data Platform) to deliver intelligent services and intelligent business applications that help rethink business. SAP Cloud Platform and its ecosystem of partners will play a pivotal role in delivering value for the Intelligent Suite – rethinking business and delivering value as accelerators, extensions and new products on SAP Cloud Platform.
However, we also live in a hybrid world where customers demand openness and choice, not compromise. Consequently, SAP is constantly assessing the capabilities needed to deliver to meet these demanding requirements.
When applying these requirements to SAP Cloud Platform we need to provide agility, portability, expertise, and multi-cloudoptions for customers. To ensure choice and flexibility we have introduced a Private PaaS offering that builds on our ecosystems’ expanding data-centre footprint, as well as industry and functional expertise.
At SAPPHIRE in June we announced our private cloud offering for the first time with our intent to work with IBM as our first partner. At TechEd we build on the original announcement by announcing PoC availability of SAP Cloud Platform, private cloud on IBM infrastructure in North America in Q4. In addition, at Tech Ed Barcelona, we announce that Atos will be our second private cloud partner, initially focused on EMEA with data-centre capacity in Germany.
Why does a customer benefit?
SAP Cloud Platform is a proven enterprise PaaS that helps customers build cloud-native business applications. It supports several programming environments, includes business, application and integration services all available on a choice of public cloud provides delivering flexibility and agility to simplify and accelerate application development and innovation. It is safe to say, that although public cloud consumption continues to grow, there are multiple workloads and business use cases that require a private option: whether it is regulated industry requirements, the desire for a dedicated instance, or the need to be hosted in your own data-centre.
Our strategy with private cloud is to have a small number of dedicated partners that bring geographical reach, industry experience, and technology differentiation. The critical element though will be the technology differentiation – where the partner delivers additional cloud services, accelerators andor apps as part of its private offering.
IBM, as an example, has global reach with 60+ IBM data centres with an initial private cloud focus on North Americaand expertise in public sector, financial services and healthcare.
Atos, on the other hand, gives a strong European presence, big data and Industry 4.0 experience, and strength in utilities, discrete manufacturing and public sector.
SAP is also investigating future new partnerships that focus on target strategic industries and geographical expansion to ensure the best coverage model and skills mix to support our customers’ private cloud requirements around the globe.
How will this be marketed, sold and delivered?
Private cloud is an SAP price list item that will be sold by our team of technology, industry and LoB sales specialists. It will sit next to our public cloud edition offering and has a simple pricing structure that incorporates a Foundation Package that applies an uplift to our standard public PaaS pricing. The customer will be able to select which private cloud they want to be deployed into based on their specific business needs.
Our private cloud partners will also be able to sell this offering and will price for the additional services delivered into “their version” private cloud:
Atos is expected to deliver CODEX services, a portfolio of data-driven smart business services, that will enrich the private cloud offering. It also has a consulting and services portfolio that can help customers on their migration journey from legacy systems to the cloud.
IBM has expertise designing, deploying and managing hybrid cloud landscapes and can also offer differentiating innovation capabilities via IBM Global Business Services and will also bring its experience in blockchain to solve new business challenges.
We are very excited by these partnerships as they help customers get access to SAP’s proven open standards-based enterprise PaaS in hybrid environments, offering an option for a dedicated or isolated landscape, to meet their data privacy and regulatory requirements. More importantly, we are really leveraging the differentiated capabilities of our ecosystem. For more information please also read the linked blogs from
Atos and
IBM.