Vodafone to move SAP S/4HANA ERP system to Google Cloud Vodafone has announced it is migrating its SAP S/4HANA ERP platform from an on-premises installation to Google Cloud. In a statement released today, the global telecoms provider, which boasts revenue of around €45.58 billion (c $44 billion), said it had been running on on-premises for 15 years, "during which time it has …
I'd agree that loss of data sovereignty is a potentially catastrophic risk. But, thus far, there is not the slightest indication of Google doing anything with customer data on its compute engine. It doesn't really need to: the costs of getting the data back make it very much a one way bet.
Google using their headline customers' customer's data would sink them reputationally and financially.
These contracts are usually worth multi billion $, so do you really believe that the people doing these deals, along with the countless lawyers involved won't include hefty penalties for even minor cock ups?
They will be making far more in profit from this than they would from your weird history of 'Google and M$ are shit haha'.
It's only a risk if you get caught.
Getting caught is only a problem if you suffer consequences.
Consequences only exist if you don't have leverage on practically everyone using the Net.
Fines only matter if they're more than a mere rounding error on your balance sheet.
Vodafone also said it would increase its release-cycle frequency for its SAP software from bi-annual rollouts to weekly ones, increasing agility and introducing features faster.
Spoken like someone who has had little or no experience of enterprise software where change is (rightly in most contexts) viewed as the enemy.
SAP is a beast and has pernicious licensing but its history in the enterprise means, that once you've spent all the millions customising it, it will generally do what you want and then keep doing it. Just don't try thinking you can change anything. I don't even need to say quickly, it doesn't exist in the SAP approved dictionary.
However, the biggest problem with this is the idea that things might end up being cheaper. That's only ever going to happen if you figure out a way to get off SAP. Otherwise, any savings you may will soon be mopped up by new licensing conditions.
... send everything to external supplier and reduce themselves more and more to SIM resellers and marketing departments. But hey, this is the company the previous CEO greatest achievement was to move offices inside London so management had more expensive restaurants and clubs nearby, His stint as Italian minister is over - do you want him back?
A book seller could become the largest cloud provider - "mighty" telcos made so much money investing so little they keep on dreaming about making easy money with flashy ads promising the latest mobe - let see how long it will last.
"The traditional on-prem, highly customised ERP solution, absolutely, positively has to give way to a more SaaS-based ERP solution," he said.
"... perhaps the way you've operated ... five years ago is not the way you want to operate it today ... How your business is operating in a post-pandemic world, there could be a lot of opportunities" Scott said.
So what - at a technology level - is different to running infrastructure on prem vs in the cloud that was vastly different 5 years ago? What does the post-pandemic world have to do with any of this?
That stock response from Scott seems to be the kind of bullshit cloud vendors will have sold to him on the basis that "the cloud" is the answer to everything: costs less, is easier to maintain, it's more secure**.. and also has zero migration costs and risks. Anyone competent knows this is absolute nonsense. Moving services to the cloud does not result in automatic benefits, but cloud vendors seem keen to tell everyone otherwise.
So please enlighten me as to what, other than the hardware not being on their premises and the pricing model, is actually any different to what they were doing 5 years ago?
** Re security: "hosting SAP on Google Cloud is a foundation for digital innovation and maintaining cybersecurity"
Except it doesn't result in any cybersecurity benefits, lest we forget that GCP instances are unmanaged.
Wondering what the actual business drivers is here. Not just because the C-heads have been shown the latest snake oil. If I was running something that business critical, I’d want hardware I can kick and people to fix it. Yes cloud is sold as resilient etc but I’d want to be shown inter-centre failover working first before even thinking about the merits of spending huge amounts of cash on it.
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