HP and SAP: What we need is a MASHED UP cloud The next step in cloud computing is to mash up all the different clouds hanging about with traditional IT systems to give one big mixed-up cloud, SAP and HP both insist. Sven Denecken, SAP AG's VP of strategy and co-innovation cloud solutions and Christian Verstraete, chief technologist of cloud strategy at HP, were sharing …
SAP and doing things cheaply - that dog won't hunt.
Yes they will tell CEO's that moving the IT systems to the cloud will work out cheaper, and many of those poor soul's will buy that fabrication. But I've yet to to see any SAP system outsourced that actually saved the customer money; far from it, they usually end up paying much more for a service that they have little control over.
As for "everything to be mobile, because that's the way that the users wanted it"; what utter tosh. Yes there are some valid reasons for some things to be mobile, but certainly not everything. Most of the examples they push forward are based around marketing type apps, which are OK for marketing drones, but sod all use to an FD or credit controller trying to work out which deadbeat customers still haven't paid their bills.
"The CIO ends up being responsible for a lot of things he can't control." And one guaranteed way of doing that is to buy into the kool-aid that SAP wants you to swallow; that everything they do is wonderful and you just have to follow their lead for everything to be perfect.
As for HP, their services have become increasingly poor over the past few years; I am going to have to spend the rest of the year picking the bones out of god awful cockup that they are responsible for, so don't tell me that they are in any way capable of offering satisfactory advice.
""As a user, I don't want to know any of that background."; absolutely true. But someone at your company had better bloody well know and understand about that stuff otherwise you are going to end up being completely screwed over, possibly even to the point where your business goes down the pan.
"'We've moved away from doing it cheaper' (Thank god)"
Really? The overriding emphasis I got from attending day 1 of the event was that everything was cheaper "in the cloud" because you "only pay for what you use". (I didn't attend the HP / SAP presentation unfortunately.) The aforementioned terminology did seem to get bandied around a lot along with the "single pane of glass" expression I'll add to my buzzwords collection. There was also an abundance of dashboards, dashboards, dashboards - lots of vendors with pretty control panels on display.
I get the idea that cloud probably represents a step in the right direction and does indeed seem to offer flexibility and versatility our world demands. However, questions over whose local law your data is subject to and vendor lock-in still remain. I took El Reg's advice (from a previous cloud article here) and asked a vendor about avoiding lock-in. Sure enough, he didn't have an answer!
Side note: Entrance to the venue was a bit of a shambles - long big snaking queue of people all waiting to scan in at only 5 shiny terminals.
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