Provisioning SAP in the Cloud

SAP has been cautious to not play favorites with cloud providers and offers businesses choices between AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. 

SAP reputedly also has offerings via IBM Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and the Huawei Cloud. 

You could argue that the relationship with Azure is largely driven through a long relationship between Microsoft and SAP, AWS and Google, because many companies already use these two providers and would want to consolidate their hosting arrangements. The relationship with IBM is likely similar, although IBM and SAP also go back with very long-term business relationships. 

The odd ones out might be considered to be Alibaba and Huawei but in order to appeal to a burgeoning Asian market this pair of relationships is likely key to a larger Asia strategy. The most interesting is probably the offering via Amazon though. 

The SAP relationship with Amazon has largely focused on certifying Amazon cloud infrastructure as suitable for the SAP Cloud Platforms as a Service offering (PaaS) and to support SAP databases - in particular those interested in running HANA - SAP's in memory non SQL database, however there is an interesting proposition here if a given customer wants to rip and replace their MSSQL or Oracle DB and shift to something like Amaozn's RDS Aurora. The AWS environment SAP Cloud Platform was certified in May 2017. 

In general, all the effort at Amazon has been aimed at supporting SAP customers in being able to run their own applications on Amazon infrastructure instead of in their own datacentres. 

SAP also offers managed SaaS and intend to offer managed instances to public sector customers on AWS GovCloud (US). At present SAP SaaS applications are not offered through AWS Marketplace. 

I get the desire to give customers choices for where they might choose to stand up systems but I can't help continuing to feel that this is a play for the mid segment, one where SAP is likely to have some traction but also one where the big ERP users and customers are unlikely to want to ever let their data loose in the wild. 

Conservatism around ERP and ERP data seems to still be an area of hypercautiousness especially when it comes to considering the cloud. 

https://it.toolbox.com