How did we hit upon the idea of SAP Cloud Computing?

Cirrus Group is celebrating an anniversary this year: we've now been in the IT consulting business for 20 years. The manageable size of our company brings opportunities, but also involves some risks. We've overcome the dangers because we've stuck to what we do best – in our case, SAP technology. As a mid-sized company we're agile and always close to market with our services. More than half of our management team is active in customer projects. Because of that we establish valuable customer relationships and experience first-hand what matters most to existing SAP customers – or in the worst case, what keeps them up at nights.  Its the enomous cost pressure. Operating SAP is expensive. It's been that way for some time now. So even as early as 1998, we first had the idea that we could find a remedy, given the rising SAP euphoria. However, at that time we were still lacking the necessary technology, in spite of the Internet and the possibility of accessing data and systems globally without limits.

The emergence of service-oriented architectures (SOA) and the increasing IT virtualization over the past 5 years helped us tremendously. It was now also possible for a small company like us to develop and provide fully automated services to locations around the world via the Internet, without a huge investment.

SAP is extremely complex. Its systems require a good deal of infrastructure – and that's expensive. An SAP system landscape always consists of business-critical, i.e. production, systems, and non-business-critical systems like test or demo systems. Both systems use the same architectures. The non-business-critical SAP systems in this case are completely overcharged; because they meet the same top standards for data in many components as do the production systems.

So that was the basis and main motivation for us to develop our SAP Cloud Computing Solution. We knew it had to be possible to offer non-business-critical SAP platforms at a price that anyone could afford. On top of that, the useful life of a test, demo, prototype or training system is naturally much shorter than that of production systems. With its "pay only for what you use" principle, the Xaas model deals with that reality very well.