Structure 09: SAP Aims to Glue Together the Hybrid Enterprise Cloud

Liz Gannes — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:29:19 +0000

SAP, not exactly an early cloud adopter, thinks cloud computing will factor significantly into large-scale computing services, said SAP CTO Vishal Sikka in conversation with GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco today. But that doesn’t mean enterprise services of the future will be any simpler, said Sikka.

“The landscape is always heterogeneous,” he said, repeating multiple times throughout the conversation the admonition, “One size doesn’t fit all.”

In some cases, a cloud solution makes sense; in others, a more traditional one. In some cases, a private cloud makes sense; in others, a public cloud offers a better benefit. SAP aims to offer software that helps all these systems together. And so interoperability should be a key priority for any enterprise cloud solution; a lock-in approach is less likely to succeed.

Even with pervasive electricity, Sikka pointed out, people still carry around batteries. Not for any lack of electricity, but because some things are always local, and some things are better shared.

Video of the chat is here:

Photo by James Duncan Davidson.

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Structure 09: SAP Aims to Glue Together the Hybrid Enterprise Cloud