Do Google, Alibaba and AWS still have a chance?

With "Embrace", SAP has launched a program to show existing customers a way into the hyperscaler cloud. For optics, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Alibaba are given equal billing.

In real life, the singular partnership between Microsoft and SAP has long been decided: U.S. analyst Josh Greenbaum was at Microsoft's Ignite in-house trade show in early November.

He came back with the message "The Ultimate Enterprise Software Alliance: How SAP and Microsoft Plan to Take over the Enterprise Software Market."

Why Microsoft and SAP? There is a long-standing business relationship between the companies - de facto, Microsoft has been there since the beginning of R/3's success with Windows and SQL.

Amazon and Google have become successful with the "not invented here" philosophy. Hardware and software are developed in-house according to the company's own ideas, which has enormous advantages in terms of organization, independence and contribution margin - but makes cooperation with other IT groups complex or even complicated.

While Amazon celebrates the "ejection" of the last Oracle database from its cloud system, Microsoft allies itself with Suse Linux.

Microsoft's new openness and transparency makes it easier for SAP and its existing customers to rely on the Azure cloud platform.

Due to the economies of scale, AWS will remain cheaper and Google will probably be more innovative due to the enormous research investments - but an "Ultimate Enterprise Software Alliance" is apparently only trusted to SAP and Microsoft.

Google's trump card in the enterprise market is Rob Enslin. The former SAP executive knows all about the wishes and needs of SAP's existing customers. In the DACH region, his first public appearance was a veritable false start.

Google staged itself in Munich on the last day of the DSAG annual congress, when the SAP community celebrated itself in Nuremberg. Google will not achieve success in this country with so little respect.

AWS is still completely unpredictable for many SAP experts due to its cloud potency. The former online bookseller is expected to do a lot organizationally and technically, but strategically AWS is difficult to assess:

Is the SAP community a serious area of activity for AWS? Or will AWS drop its SAP users like a hot potato again if the margin is too low?

In contrast to the Nordic countries, Alibaba hardly exists in the German-speaking countries. Whether this is strategic or coincidental cannot be verified due to the Chinese group's secrecy.

There are numerous connections and entanglements between SAP itself and Microsoft, so that many existing SAP customers feel they are part of a stable network.

In addition to a shared and successful R/3 past, there are also agreements in the present that go beyond Hana in the Azure cloud:

More than a year ago, Microsoft, SAP, and Adobe unveiled the Open Data Initiative to synchronize a CRM data model. Ex-CEO Bill McDermott personally initiated this SAP milestone against Salesforce - probably in the hope of saving his C/4 presented a few months earlier at Sapphire 2018 in Orlando.

McDermott was disruptively replaced by co-CEOs Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein. The dust has settled, making an analysis possible at the end of the year: Is Microsoft the better SAP?

If SAP gets the double release change - Hana and S/s4 - in order, then SAP will remain set in the back office for the next 25 years.

However, because the S/4 release change will not de facto take place in 2025 with a new deadline, but life-extending measures for SoH (Suite on Hana) are being discussed at SAP itself and at the user associations ASUG and DSAG, SAP is losing sight of other important areas.

Alongside this, SAP is fully occupied with achieving a stable Hana platform and preparing for Hana 3 and its 2025 deadline.

One man's grief is another man's joy! Microsoft warmly welcomes SAP to the Azure platform and will gladly transfer 70 million euros over the next three years.

The opportunities for Microsoft are huge because SAP no longer has the resources to move Leonardo and C/4 forward fast enough, see Deadline 2025.

Any AI and IoT extension to the core SAP system is better off in Azure. Microsoft's offerings are not only cheaper, but also more comprehensive - and original:

While SAP has to help itself to Nvidia in terms of AI, Microsoft has either developed itself or relied on the open source community. C/4 is inferior to Microsoft CRM in almost all respects, and of course Salesforce as well.

US analyst Josh Greenbaum is already predicting a replacement of C/4 by Dynamics CRM based on the aforementioned Open Data Initiative from Microsoft, SAP, and Adobe.

SAP in the back office and Microsoft in the front office based on the Azure cloud platform could become "The Ultimate Enterprise Software Alliance". The probability is high because it would be a win-win-win situation.

Not only SAP's existing customers would gain, but also Microsoft through its successful entry into the enterprise software market and, of course, SAP, because the ERP world market leader could then finally concentrate on its unique core competencies again.