SAP In The Cloud: Market Update And Lessons Learned From Early Adopters

The cloud continues to get a lot of attention — and scrutiny — from IT buyers. Most IT buyers have accepted the value of the cloud for process areas such as human capital management and customer relationship management (CRM), but many wonder (and doubt) whether the cloud has relevance in their core enterprise resource planning (ERP) suites, particularly applications like SAP that run end-to-end business processes. This document looks at key areas where SAP customers leverage the cloud (and quasi-cloud) models within SAP landscapes and share their experiences, good and bad. We found that true, multitenant public cloud case studies are very limited in SAP, but some customers have moved onto private or quasi-cloud platforms: platforms that offer flexibility, economies of scale, and pay-as-you-go pricing — but are not available in a true public cloud (e.g., Amazon.com or salesforce.com) model.