App-happy SAP Santa offers partners free access to Cloud Platform

It's never free unless they can't sell it

The only reason a software company ever gives something away for free is either to lock you into a paid item shortly thereafter or because they are simply unable to sell the product to any customers. I suspect that more of the latter is involved here.

Didn't SAP up and abandon some mid size all in one cloud offering deal they had running a few years with a simple "leave the platform by year end we are shutting down" notice? I don't think Oracle or SAP is getting real good take up on the cloud because they want lock in, rather than putting a working platform on whatever Cloud platform the user chooses, AWS, Azure, Google and so forth. This is, in turn, causing companies to hold off on turning their products to cloud based services and just causing a serious "what other options do we have" across the whole industry. Give this a few years and their entire revenue structure might be significantly different if they don't smarten up. Applications need to simply be loadable to any cloud (and transportable) that the purchaser chooses. Having too many clouds simply doesn't do what the cloud is intended to do in the first place. But don't listen to the customers. What would they know...