How does SAP stack against Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce from an IAAS lens?

One of my new year resolutions was to start blogging actively since I personally have benefited from the amazing posts people have shared on Linked In and other sites. I hope this blog benefits you even as you are reading this now.

I also believe that is better to give than to receive (quote from the Bible).

Topic for today:

How does SAP stack against Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce from an (cloud provider- Infrastructure as a Service) IAAS availability lens?

Now I know what some of you are thinking; that’s not apple-apple since Salesforce is kind of odd man out (since others are both in the ERP & CRM space while Salesforce is not in the ERP space yet). But hang in with me to see the big picture.

Why this topic?

Industry pundits and major publications are predicting 2017 as the year of take off for business applications on cloud. Obviously everyone is aware of the staggering growth of AWS & Azure in the recent past with the last two (below table) trying to play catch up.

Background:

I have selected the 4 major business application providers (not in any order of market share or revenues just general mind share) and compared their (ERP/CRM application) availability across the 4 major cloud providers today.

I have omitted each of these business application provider (columns) as an IAAS provider since all of them have their applications hosted on their own cloud (IAAS).

IAAS Provider	SAP	ORACLE	MICROSOFT	SALESFORCE
Amazon AWS	Yes	N/A	N/A	Yes
Microsoft Azure	Yes	N/A	Yes	N/A
IBM Softlayer	Yes	N/A	N/A	N/A
Google Cloud Platform	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

You may agree or disagree with my observations but again this is a perspective of a IT professional from his eyes.

Legend:

Orange block: Most likely will not happen

Non-Orange block: Could happen in the future.

What does this table tell us, what picture does it predict?

At 50,000 feet SAP seems to be the winner if any CIO were to decide on a IAAS provider for his enterprise. He can hedge his risks since SAP is available on 3 of the 4 major providers and maybe on the 4^th one in the near future.

For SAP and its customers it’s a win-win. Whether a CIO is part of a company with only 1 IAAS provider or multiple, SAP is available on most of them for him to decide the roadmap from a better TCO, ROI or other perspective. From a SAP's company perspective no matter which IAAS provider grows in market share, that improves SAP's probability of winning in the cloud era (although that is not the only thing that will help SAP win in the market place).

To talk a little bit about the non SAP vendors; I don’t see any of the orange blocks (in the table above) happening now or in the future (although in technology you never know).

 My justification for this observation: (orange blocks only in the table above)

ORACLE:

Oracle is trying to build its own AWS competitor cloud IAAS and hence might send a wrong message if they make their apps available on any of these 4 cloud providers.

MICROSOFT:

They are living the dream with most of the products (except the mobile portion of course). They cannot or will not make their business apps available on AWS else the wrong message goes to their customers ‘you don’t believe in your own product’.

SALESFORCE:

Their bromance with Microsoft in on a downhill with increased completion over customer wins (HP CRM deal), M&A (Linked In saga) et.al hence I don’t see Salesforce coming any time soon on Azure cloud.

The non-orange blocks mean that these business application providers could for host of reasons make themselves available on the remaining IAAS providers in the future.

Disclaimer:

The observations above are my own and do not reflect that of any of the companies mentioned in the article. Nor am I paid by any of these or other companies to express this opinion.