businesschief.eu 169SAP CLOUD FOR UTILITIES
Industry Cloud focus in 2021
Engelhardt anticipates two key product
streams in the next 5 to 10 years. Firstly, the
on-premise world, which will be deployed
more and more on private cloud environments
(incorporating the S/4HANA Utilities suite)
and secondly, native cloud solutions that come
with highly modularized architectures and
simplified business processes.
The latter won’t support the same
functional complexity of traditional
on-premise solutions but are faster to
implement and provide significant TCO
advantages. “We believe most utilities
will require a mix of both – at least until
the majority of the traditional business
processes has been fully transformed to
the digital age,” he said. “A lot of traditional
business processes cannot be supported
by native cloud applications unless the
industry changes massively – and I don’t see
that happening quickly. So having a solution
strategy that supports both worlds, like
S/4HANA on premise with the cloud, I think
that’s very important. We can support both
narratives – a complete end-to-end process
on-premise and by the end of next year, a
complete end-to-end in the native cloud,
and any combination of both.”
Consequently, SAP’s on-premise solution
will be further developed in parallel to
SAP’s investment in the cloud, he added,
identifying markets and segments which
need it. “The good thing is we can offer
the complete on-premise suite through
a subscription model in a private cloud
environment, leveraging hyper-scaler
qualities,” he said. Other priorities include:RISE for Utilities - Experience the
latest features delivered by the
SAP Cloud for Utilities Program