Fever pitch is a term that describes a state of extreme excite­ment or agi­ta­tion. It’s an apt assess­ment of what many SAP cus­tomers are feel­ing as a result of the hyper­scalers vying for their SAP appli­ca­tions and workloads.

In North Amer­i­ca, the term ​“hyper­scalers” refers to Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS), Google Cloud Plat­form (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. Make no mis­take: There’s much at stake for these three hyper­scalers because of sev­er­al mar­ket forces crash­ing into each oth­er, including:

1. Most enter­pris­es have wan­ing inter­est in run­ning their own data cen­ters, so they’re look­ing for secure and cost-effec­tive host­ing envi­ron­ments in the cloud.
2. SAP has always offered cus­tomers choice with its soft­ware — i.e., choose your own data­base to run your apps on, or sys­tems inte­gra­tor (SI) to help you imple­ment the soft­ware — and this has con­tin­ued with its approach to cer­ti­fied cloud hosts.
3. Hyper­scalers are look­ing to sell add-on ser­vices and move ​“up the stack” with their cus­tomers, which is not sur­pris­ing, since they’re busi­ness­es, too.
4. And, last­ly, there are still many oth­er viable options for cus­tomers to con­sid­er, includ­ing: oper­at­ing their own hard­ware (HP, Dell, EMC); out­sourc­ing their data cen­ter (IBM, Ver­i­zon, AT&T); and out­sourc­ing their SAP infra­struc­ture (Vir­tus­tream, Syntax).

Cus­tomers, mean­while, have been telling SAP that they’re hear­ing con­fus­ing and con­tra­dic­to­ry mes­sages from the hyper­scalers, SIs, and SAP itself as to how to actu­al­ly tran­si­tion to SAP S/4HANA. Shouldn’t mov­ing to the cloud be eas­i­er than this, SAP? (At ASUG, we’ve been hear­ing sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments.)

Which brings us back to the term fever pitch—excite­ment com­bined with agi­ta­tion, which is what many SAP cus­tomers are expe­ri­enc­ing as the end of main­te­nance date for SAP ECC moves closer.

SAP’s Project Embrace

SAP announced Project Embrace at SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence 2019. The project was a strate­gic col­lab­o­ra­tion with the three hyper­scalers and a num­ber of oth­er glob­al strate­gic ser­vice part­ners (GSSPs).

“The pro­gram itself is designed to help ASUG mem­bers and oth­er SAP cus­tomers move to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud, but with­in the con­text of their exist­ing tech­nol­o­gy stacks and IT envi­ron­ments,” ASUG wrote of the announce­ment.

Five months lat­er, on Oct. 21, SAP changed things up. It announced an ​“exten­sive go-to-mar­ket part­ner­ship — from con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion to sales — to accel­er­ate cus­tomer adop­tion of SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud Plat­form on Microsoft Azure.” Cus­tomers still retained their choice of hyper­scaler as part of the Embrace pro­gram, but Azure was now the ​“pre­ferred cloud provider.”

The core dif­fer­en­tia­tor for cus­tomers who want to go with Azure rests on these four pil­lars, accord­ing to SAP:

1. Mar­ket approved jour­neys (i.e., a col­lec­tion of indus­try-based use cas­es that will serve as the foun­da­tion for cus­tomers’ SAP S/4HANA transitions)
2. Ref­er­ence archi­tec­ture (i.e., a joint­ly devel­oped tech­ni­cal blue­print that will con­tin­ue to be enhanced)
3. A cloud plat­form solu­tion (the SAP Cloud Plat­form on Azure as the core platform)
4. Dig­i­tal busi­ness ser­vices (pre­mi­um sup­port ser­vices from both SAP and Microsoft)

That’s the crux of it. SAP says that it wants to offer cus­tomers more than just its SAP S/4HANA cloud part­ner cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for hyper­scalers. With the Azure part­ner­ship, SAP is empha­siz­ing clar­i­ty and ease of con­sump­tion over vari­able tech­ni­cal options and myr­i­ad paths to take.

Unlike in the past, SAP is now offer­ing a pre­scrip­tive set of cloud plat­form and data­base ser­vices, which is a big change. As one senior exec at SAP told me: ​“In the past, SAP didn’t use to have an opin­ion on what you did once you bought the soft­ware from us. Now we do.”

I’d love to know what SAP cus­tomers are hear­ing or if you have any ques­tions. As always, you can email me your thoughts.