More Racing to the Cloud: SAP Adds Virtualization
SAP covered three basic segments at their SAPPHIRE conference last week: on-premise, on-demand, and on-device product strategy. And while the on-demand end news was largely speculative and related to plans for future products, they did announce a virtualization partnership with Cisco, EMC, and VMware’s Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition.
The VCE was formed in 2009, and aggregates computing, network, storage, security, management, and virtualization technologies from the three conferencing solutions providers; SAP will be leveraging VCE’s Vblock virtualization infrastructure for testing app deployments. Furthermore, Vblock will allow SAP customers to deliver shared services via private clouds. Private clouds are a touchy subject for some, but the main objective here is to allow customers to leverage their SAP products on a cloud environment, thereby lowering hardware and software expenses.
SAP has long been lagging on the SaaS front, and while the VCE partnership is a step in the right direction, unfortunately for them, it’s another delayed provision. Lawson began offering a similar service via the Amazon cloud, and Consona recently announced they’d be doing the same.
When news of SAP’s cloud ERP attempts come to light, it’s so easy to point to the examples that precede them and take issue with whatever lag exists. And it’s true that a company of SAP’s size and reputation has some shaping up to do. But the fact remains that they still offer strong business software products, and if they keep making cloud-focused plays, they could very likely better their situation within the next year or two.
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