SAP is reported to be on the verge of releasing the first fruits of a Cloud-project code-named River, which has been under development for the last 18 months and will run on multiple public Cloud platforms, including the vendor’s own.
The first River-based 'lightweight' service called Carbon Impact 5.0 is due to be unveiled next month and will run on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Vishal Sikka, SAP’s chief technology officer, said that River applications were meant to be simple to use, comprising on a few dozen screens, and would be easy to customise and extend. "The first is on Amazon, but the platform is designed to run on multiple clouds. Over time, it will run on multiple clouds, including our own," he explained.
Sikka added that more complex Cloud-based services would be based on the company’s BusinessByDesign platform for the mid-market, which was scheduled to enter into broader release later this year.
But he said that he did not expect the company to make its enterprise ERP systems available in the Cloud "for the foreseeable future", although customers might choose to use services such as Amazon for development and testing.
"Technology’s just not at a point where you can run a mission-critical application on a public Cloud. There isn’t one contributing factor to it, but really several," he said. Such factors included concerns over data privacy, data integration, regulatory hurdles and system resource issues.
While offerings such as Salesforce.com’s CRM service were "relatively straightforward", the complexity of SAP’s enterprise application suite meant that "a very uniform composition of simple hardware resources may not be the right [approach]", Sikka said.
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