Duty to cooperate

Hands-on work in the data center, showing initiative during release upgrades and inventing a few ECC workarounds - that's what SAP's existing customers have been used to since R/2 and R/3. Cloud computing should now free them from all on-prem troubles and pains, because the cloud should be the logical continuation of outsourcing and hosting.

The move to the cloud was supposed to reduce the workload for SAP's existing customers. But SAP sees things differently: SAP's cloud standard only includes rudimentary services - without active cooperation, very little happens. In SAP's cloud self-image, there is an explicit obligation for existing customers to cooperate.

In operational use, the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) becomes a cost trap and, as a result, a deceptive package. The deeper SAP customers delve into the secrets and structures of the BTP, the more they realize that they are dealing with the old HEC, Hana Enterprise Cloud. Label fraud? Maybe, because HEC wasn't wrong or bad, but BTP should be more at a fair price. What the existing SAP customer might have tolerated as "teething problems" with HEC, they want to find as an automated service on BTP.

The fact is that many existing SAP customers hardly notice any difference between BTP and HEC. Perhaps BTP can do more than HEC. From the perspective of SAP Basis and the perspective of a CCoE manager, the difference between HEC and BTP is marginal - but not for the CFO and CIO!

The low fees of SAP's BTP at the beginning explain and reveal themselves only after several months of operation. There is a kind of duty to cooperate in the SAP cloud: It gets expensive! Those who do not want to or cannot do it themselves have to accept a significant surcharge. Naturally, SAP also remains helpfully on hand in the cloud, but it quickly costs the existing customer a multiple of the originally accepted maintenance fee.

What the outsourcer or hoster used to do for the existing SAP customer as a service, the existing customer has to do independently in the SAP cloud. Naturally, SAP also offers services, but these usually have to be paid for separately. If the existing SAP customer cannot fulfill his obligation to cooperate, it will be expensive!

A full cost calculation is difficult to obtain because experience with SAP's cloud computing is lacking. The Business Technology Platform thus remains an expensive one-way street, because the cloud exit strategy back to the less expensive on-prem system is missing. Realistic transition time and a return to the source are not planned. The existing SAP customer is therefore puzzled by the convoluted roadmaps - and has been since the golden R/3 days when Professor Henning Kagermann still held the SAP atlas in his hands.