My company uses SAP as an ERP. They’ve been trying to push HANA on us for ages, promoting their cloud service as a manner of lessening the sticker-shock.
When news came through of Google and SAP ‘partnering’, upper management saw the writing on the way and went into full money-is-no-object mode and mandated the firm have a plan to switch away from SAP to alternative solutions (that I am not at liberty to discuss) within twelve months, with and that this plan must involve switching over within no more than ninety days including integration tests. Much preliminary work and change requests have been formulated and even implemented not even knowing if they will ever be needed (i.e. if data-sharing policies change and/or an actual acquisition becomes a real prospect).
Why? The reason is simple: the last thing a company that values its IT and operational profiles wants is to find itself in a situation where it can be data-mined by a publicity-driven juggernaut such as Google. Any expense is suitable to head off that threat.
No major corporation would be willing to shoulder this risk. It's the stuff upper-management's nightmare are made of. And decision-makers in positions of power within SAP and to a lesser extent Google are well aware of this. They won't precipitate a nuclear war with their own clients.
How could this be inconceivable to you? With all supplier and customer data codified into a standardised structured format, you’d instantly have a ”social network”of all the firms operating at various stages in a value chain, and probably the best model ever of how the whole economy is composed in detail. You’d get the bills of materials, ’recipes’ for just about anything anybody produces; you’d get their profit margins from the controlling modules, you’d be able to estimate the risk banks are exposed to by aggregating the loans they give out to companies and estimating the default risks of each and tot the up.
Forget knowing what executives google... you’d have a real-time fingerprint of the whole economy, ready to be explored and monetized.
This would be... terrifying. Imagine if google discovered that (oh, I don’t know) some firm supplying parts into the Pixel product line had high margins on one of those items, and decided to play hardball to push it down. Suppose Google discovered that one small firm competing with it depend ended on another customer for most of its current revenue, and Google decided to focus its ’competition’ on changing that key client’s idea?
When news came through of Google and SAP ‘partnering’, upper management saw the writing on the way and went into full money-is-no-object mode and mandated the firm have a plan to switch away from SAP to alternative solutions (that I am not at liberty to discuss) within twelve months, with and that this plan must involve switching over within no more than ninety days including integration tests. Much preliminary work and change requests have been formulated and even implemented not even knowing if they will ever be needed (i.e. if data-sharing policies change and/or an actual acquisition becomes a real prospect).
Why? The reason is simple: the last thing a company that values its IT and operational profiles wants is to find itself in a situation where it can be data-mined by a publicity-driven juggernaut such as Google. Any expense is suitable to head off that threat.
No major corporation would be willing to shoulder this risk. It's the stuff upper-management's nightmare are made of. And decision-makers in positions of power within SAP and to a lesser extent Google are well aware of this. They won't precipitate a nuclear war with their own clients.