Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily news and commentary show, hosted by Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the Cloud.
This episode is sponsored by Acceleration Economy’s Generative AI Digital Summit. View the event, which features practitioner and platform insights on how solutions such as ChatGPT will impact the future of work, customer experience, data strategy, cybersecurity, and more, by registering for your free on-demand pass.
In this Cloud Wars Minute, Bob Evans elaborates on SAP’s priorities, which CEO Christian Klein gave insight into during last week’s earnings call.
Highlights
00:40 — SAP CEO Christian Klein laid out some broad priorities on last week’s Q1 earnings call. “ChatGPT is very hot, as far as priorities go, and on-premises is not,” explains Bob.
01:00 — SAP has 20,000 on-premises customers, but the issue now is with standard maintenance for any ERP system that came about before S/4HANA Cloud. Standard maintenance will end in December of 2027. Klein noted that the reason behind this is that SAP has to address these new priorities, like generative AI and ChatGPT.
01:47 — On the earnings call, Klein noted that it is a “great gift” for SAP to have a “huge install base.” Additionally, he noted that SAP “wants to use R+D capacity and investments in the most effective way…there are so many new technologies we’re eager to deploy in the cloud, including ChatGPT.”
02:30 — In a few weeks at its Sapphire conference, SAP will be releasing some details about how it will integrate ChatGPT into its business applications. Klein noted that there are about 50 use cases in which SAP has developed solutions around generative AI.
02:52 — For SAP, this represents the notion that leaders have to make hard choices, explains Bob. This also provides an incentive for SAP customers who are wondering if now is the time to move to the cloud.
03:55 — Broadly, I think that this is just another manifestation of how SAP has jumped eagerly into the business of not just saying it’s cloud-first but being cloud-first.”
