Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I examine the significance of SAP’s Datasphere platform in driving innovation and competitiveness in the ever-expanding cloud market.
Highlights
00:15 — There’s so much going on in the industry today around data clouds. Snowflake is sort of the creator of this category. We’ve seen Marc Benioff and Salesforce say it’s the hottest-selling product they’ve ever had. I talked recently with Irfan Khan, president and chief product officer for SAP’s HANA Database & Analytics, and asked why SAP didn’t use “data cloud” naming.
01:06 — With Datasphere, customers can support both SAP and non-SAP data, analytic services, and much more. Plus, now they’ve got over 100 petabytes of customer data that SAP has access to. It’s not just ERP, but also across HCM and CX. Customers can build the models now for their AI services, then they can use SAP’s Joule copilot to ask questions.
02:37 — According to Khan, the data cloud is an interesting concept, but Datasphere has all that and more. Customers have been convinced that cloud is the architecture of the future, that the cloud is the perfect delivery vehicle for AI, and that you can’t have an AI strategy without a very strong data foundation. Datasphere gives people that.
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03:25 — These new influencers in customer decisions come from all parts of the organization and are never going to get deep down into the whys and wherefores. They just know they need to make the best use of all their data, get more of it into the hands of more of their employees, and tie that in very tightly with what they’re doing with GenAI. Now Datasphere has all of that.
04:33 — Whether or not customers get to the point where they say, “Hey, SAP, I thought you had a data cloud, where’s that?” Or whether they would just look at that whole naming convention of data cloud and put that aside — it’s an interesting question.
04:49 — I think more and more the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies have to take into account their naming conventions in line with what customers think about those potential names, rather than just on a technology basis. We’ll see what SAP does with this. It’s got an extremely powerful new platform here with Datasphere.
