SAP - Getting out of the Hosting Business

SAP has announced that they are getting out of the hosting business. They have signed a deal with AT&T and plan to migrate thier hosted customers to AT&T as each customer's contract expires.

I am very dissapointed to hear this news. My company has used SAP hosting for the past 4 years and it was the best experience we have had. Our monthly application availability was at 100% with the exception of 3 incidences over the past 4 years. Even in the months of those incidents our application availability did not drop below 99.5%.

Application Availability is defined as the percentage of time the application is available to users. It is sometimes comfused with server availability. If the servers are up, but the network is down or the application is down, it does not do you any good. Application availablity is the best measurement to use because it means that everything is up and running and users can actually use the systems.

SAP Hosting service are outstanding. We have never had a situation where the hosting side of the business said our problem required SAP Software involvement. With other hosting companies, our requests were often put on hold until the hosting partner "checked with SAP" on something. SAP Hosting was always able to handle such things internally and we never needed to deal with issues between hosting and software or professional services. SAP Hosting is the best at upgrades, and the installation of new SAP software. All of these types of projects were handled seemlessly. That says a lot given the complexity of our SAP environment.

We have implemented many SAP applications on the NetWeaver platform. Our upgrade from R/3 4.7 to ECC 6.0 only took about 10 weeks - and that included an upgrade from BW 3.5 to BI 7.0 which was done at the same time! The delays were on our side trying to get the downtime approved from all of our plants globally. It also included a unix and oracle upgrade! We have also upgraded our EP (Enterprise Portals) environment without a hitch. Our portals environment is used internally as an intranet site and it is exposed externally as our customer and supplier portals. The security is designed very well to ensure that customers and suppliers cannot see our intranet, but they can see thier reports and commit to orders and forecast on line. We are also running SAP APO and SAP GRC (Governance Risk and Compliance) Access Enforcer and Compliance Calibrator on our (SCM)Supply Chain Management server. We are also running BCS (Business Consolidation System) on our BI servers. Plus we are in the process of adding GTS (Global Trade Server) to the environment.

SAP Hosting has done an outstanding job implementing and upgrading all of these systems. They help keep these applications running together seemlessly on the NetWeaver platform. I am very sad to see them leaving the hosting arena.

They never had a hidden agenda. Hardware manufacturers that offer hosting services often use the hosting service as a venu for additional hardware sales. Professional Services companies that offer hosting service often use the hosting service to as a venu for additional professional services income. SAP, of course, is a software provider. But I never felt pressure from the hosting organization to buy more software.

I wish they would reconsider thier decision to leave the business.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on the subject.

Cheers,
Dan