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SAP 404s sap.com blog post that said it's fallen behind on SaaS subs
Partner-penned post said SAP might be as good as Google or IBM ... one day
Well this is awkward: SAP appears to have canned a blog post that appeared on SAP.com that said the company is struggling to win subscription revenue and is not yet the natural choice to house cloudy ERP.
The post popped up in the RSS feed of SAP’s blogs on Monday April 23rd, but the link to the article now returns a message saying “This is somewhat embarrassing, isn’t it? It seems we can’t find what you’re looking for. Perhaps searching can help.”
We’ll save you the effort: searching SAP.com won’t help. You need to search Google’s cache to find the since-deleted post, titled “SAP Cloud Platform and S/4HANA Cloud” and penned by a chap from HCL Technologies.
HCL and SAP are partners but you wouldn’t know it from the post as the author included the following commentary:
Increasing number of organizations have started experimenting with cloud and moving selected applications to cloud or hybrid-cloud. Amazon and Microsoft are reaping rich dividends for having envisioned this trend ahead of the competition. SAP is currently falling behind in terms of subscription base but this could change rapidly once larger applications are moved to the cloud including the ERP system.
The post paints a picture of SAP as a new-ish PaaS player that knows what enterprise buyers want and “could possibly be catching up on the likes of Google and IBM in a couple of years.” It also says that SAP’s own cloud won’t be attractive until APIs arrive to make migrations between clouds easier.
It's not hard to see why SAP nixed the post: the claim that it's struggling to secure subscriptions is stock market poison. Overall, however, the post is naïve, rather than HCL dumping on SAP. But it’s also far from a good look for a global titan to have this sort of stuff make it onto the web at all. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
