Gartner says hold onto your wallets as SAP's cloud pitch trades control for convenience

One of SAP's preferred methods for migrating systems to the cloud risks IT departments losing control of operational running costs, Gartner has warned. The global IT research and advisory firm said that to mitigate the risks, user organizations need to understand the different variants of RISE with SAP, the German software …

[aerogems]

Monkey see, monkey do

Why is it every single time these PR statements can be boiled down to, "Everyone else is doing it"?

I'm also curious about who uses a "public" cloud version of SAP. "Sure, let's just put all our mission critical proprietary data into a shared environment where the only thing stopping someone from looking at our data is maybe a hypervisor!" China's industrial spies must love how easy SAP has made their job. Compromise one admin and you get access to several customers worth of data. And then there's just the practical implications where you're running your instance of SAP on the same hardware as someone else. You know they're going to underprovision the physical hardware and oversell access to it, just like ISPs have been doing in the US (and probably elsewhere) since their inception, so it doesn't matter how they configure your specific environment because you can't virtually create more CPU power, and if your entire database lives in a ramdisk, not having enough physical RAM becomes a problem as well.

Then meanwhile, SAP keeps trying to shove everyone onto their Fiori... ahem... platform before it can even replace all the functionality of the old SAPgui. And then in the areas where functionality is at least comparable, they've somehow managed to make SAP's infamously bad UI design even worse. Literally the only thing I like better about the new product master over the old material master, is that the Fiori web view can show you all the plants and slocs a material is extended to. Doing that takes a bit of extra work with the old gui. Everything else takes about 2-3X longer and is several more steps than is necessary, so it's not worth it on balance.

Of course SAP knows they have you. Converting to something else is so expensive and painful only like Fortune 100 companies can even seriously contemplate doing it. Then, even if they do decide they want to switch, what else is there? To paraphrase Churchill, SAP is the worst ERP in the world, except for all the rest.