Published on the 02/04/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
SAP will open its own Sydney-based data centre tomorrow, initially to host SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, but eventually also as the host data centre for its Business ByDesign ERP solution…
Responding to entrenched business preference that key data be hosted locally SAP has announced that it will open its own local data centre – initially to host the SAP HANA private managed cloud infrastructure, and eventually a range of other business applications.
The local data centre will allow customers to keep data in Australia – and also reduces latency and high bandwidth costs associated with sending large swathes of data to international cloud computing data centres for processing.
Steve Hodgkinson, research director IT, Asia Pacific at Ovum believes having a local data centre can offer technology vendors a competitive edge noting; “The winners of the cloud services game will be those that can leverage global infrastructure and software for economies of scale as well as the ability to operate locally when customers require locally accountable providers and control over the location of their data. Cloud services providers targeting the enterprise market must learn how to play both globally and locally.”
Late last year SAP caused widespread user confusion in Australia and New Zealand when it announced it was slowing work on the ByDesign cloud ERP platform to focus on SAP HANA. However the company subsequently made clear that it was in fact transitioning all cloud offerings onto the SAP HANA Platform promising that there would be price-performance benefits as a result.
According to Paul Muller, general manager of platform solutions for SAP ANZ; “SAP Business ByDesign has been hosted at a local data centre in Sydney since last year. With the establishment of the data centre for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, we intend to consolidate our locally hosted cloud solutions – including SAP Business ByDesign – on this data centre, to provide customers with the real-time capabilities of SAP HANA without disruption to their operations. With this move, we continue to deliver on our promise of moving our entire cloud portfolio onto SAP HANA.”
In addition to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAP Australia currently also offers locally hosted cloud capabilities for its SuccessFactors solutions, part of the SAP for HR portfolio and for its cloud-based ERP suite, SAP Business ByDesign.
