We ran across this article today on how SAP is one of several vendors who you can port to the cloud. It is interesting in that the article points out that while SAP does not need to run in the cloud, you can run utilities to offload the heavy processing of SAP to SAAS providers. One would assume that that would be the like so Amazon Web Services or similar.
SAP itself is definitely not a cloud application, but many might have you believe it is. This is common in many ERP solutions where they say that it can run “in the cloud” and they rely on an old ASP model where they are hosting the solution for you. To you it is “in the cloud” but in reality it is just at a server somewhere accessed via the internet.
True cloud computing, such as Netsuite or Salesforce means multi-tenant architecture, a global content delivery network and distributed computing power. So when you are looking at ERP in the cloud, be sure to find out the true structure of the providers’ cloud.
Read the referenced article:
Enterprise Cloud Services – SAP « Cloud Computing Best Practices
cloudbestpractices.net1/29/12
As the name suggests one of the key factors of 'Enterprise Cloud' is that it's intended for the enterprise market, in particular the enterprise applications that they use such as SAP, Oracle and JD Edwards amongst others.
