SAP added several new features to its cloud services on Tuesday, giving customers the option of running their workloads on all three of the big public cloud infrastructure providers and finalizing its Cloud Foundry strategy for platform services.
Cloud Foundry had been available as a public beta through SAP Cloud Platform for around a year, but it’s now generally available as SAP’s preferred cloud platform-as-a-service technology. SAP was one of the founding members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, so this path was long-ago established, but “given it has become the de-facto standard in enterprise PaaS it was a no-brainer,” wrote SAP’s Matthias Steiner, cloud platform evangelist at SAP, in a blog post.
Cloud Foundry allows companies to develop cloud-native applications without having to worry about developing a lot of the underlying services that need to talk to the infrastructure itself. Abby Kearns, executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, will be speaking at our GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit on June 7th in Bellevue, giving us one more thing to talk about.
SAP has offered customers the ability to run its software on its own infrastructure for quite some time, and now those customers running on the cloud can also choose the big public cloud providers as well. Amazon Web Services is generally available to SAP customers right away, and they can get started with Microsoft Azure as a public preview and Google Cloud Platform as a demo showcase.
The cloud came as a rude awakening to SAP and rival Oracle, and both companies are making sure current customers can stay within their environments (and revenue streams) while still being able to take advantage of all the cloud native technology that newer startups are running. These types of integrations also make it easier for SAP customers to run hybrid cloud setups, which an awful lot of older IT organizations are choosing rather than migrate wholesale to the public cloud.
