29 million cloud users announced at SapphireNow drew snickers including a snarky comment about “that must include all the pencils ordered on the Ariba cloud” :)
More vexing is the question – does the HANA cloud have enough data center infrastructure? Since SAP is moving away from the almost infinite capacity of the Amazon cloud, it must believe its 7 data centers and capacity of its partners are enough to start off.
It would be nice if SAP shared more details:
- Their square footage and compute/storage capacity
- The Capex that has gone into the data centers (to get a comparable feel to the billions the Amazon, Google and the MS Azure clouds have seen in investment over the last few years)
- The “availability zones” and other resilience SAP has built into its this grid for high availability
- The specialists SAP has hired to architect and build out the centers/certify those of its partners (hopefully some from the highly scaled consumer cloud as at Facebook or Yahoo! or from a demanding cloud infrastructure user like Netflix)
- Given SAP’s emphasis on sustainability, the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of each and the alternative fuels used to power them
- If SAP/partners expect to be as competitive as Amazon in pricing
