German tech colossus SAP, which is primarily known as a maker of traditional on-premise software, is appearing to be one of the biggest backers now of cloud computing as it recently showcased its evolving cloud technology at the ?All Cloud Conference? in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
At the event, SAP highlighted the key factors that lead businesses around the globe to recognize the need to innovate and leap to cloud computing.
The presentations in the conference asserted that businesses are faced with an ?unprecedented pace of change? that strains already scarce network resources by steadily growing users. This dynamism creates pressures across all business functions and industries.
?There is an increasing pressure for business to adapt quickly to not just survive but to thrive. Real time is no longer enough. Companies are looking at proactively reshaping their future to stay ahead of the competition working in an environment of anticipating market risks and trends to adapt their processes and develop plans and execute them ahead of anyone else,? the company said.
Francois Lancon, SAP South East Asia president and managing director, pointed out the promising Big Data opportunities coupled with a flourishing need for constant mobile computing will significantly bring transformations on customer demands and in the workplace.
?High collaboration and social requirements and pressure for greater returns on cash and investments are building up clients? expectations,? Lancon said.
?New, disruptive business models will accelerate change and innovation in the business landscape. Data doubling every 18 months is shaping up new opportunities and risks,? Lancon said.
In a 2012 Gartner survey analysis of software-as-a-service (Saas) investments, cloud computing is said to be gaining ground with 84 percent of respondents in China, India, South Korea, and Australia indicated that they intend to increase SaaS investment by year-end 2014.
On the other hand, IDG Enterprise?s 2013 Cloud Computing Research report stated last June: ?Cloud adoption is maturing and the majority of organizations (61 percent) have at least a portion of their computing infrastructure in the cloud. One-third (29 percent) anticipate that the majority of IT operations will be in the cloud in the next five years, with the exception of financial and compliance applications.?
?Cloud computing capabilities that align with business strategy are driving investments, including enabling business continuity (43 percent), improving customer support and services (43 percent), increasing flexibility to react to changing market conditions (40 percent) and reducing resource waste (40 percent),? the IDG research said.
According to an SAP study presented by Lancon, there will be about 15 billion Web-enabled devices by the end of this year that will create a ?universe of intelligence everywhere.? A huge number of workers in the enterprise space will be allowed to access business data via mobile devices anytime, anywhere.
In such a scenario, billions of social networks users ?will rewire business and personal boundaries and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017,? Lancon told Newsbytes.ph, quoting a Gartner study.
In a Cloud Computing Infrastructure survey commissioned by NTT Communications and conducted by IDG Research Services in 2012 , it is said that 2013 will be compelling for cloud deployment in the region with 80 percent of surveyed Asia Pacific IT decision-makers expect their enterprises to use a mix of in-house and third-party infrastructure in the next few years.
In the same survey, 65 percent of respondents said they are now using, evaluating, or planning to implement a combination of company-owned and third-party servers.
In May this year, SAP announced the availability of its cloud-based enterprise application solution optimized for HANA (High Performance Analytic Appliance), the company?s ?next-generation in-memory platform.?
HANA is offered as a comprehensive infrastructure combined with SAP?s managed cloud solutions. Deployable as an on-premise appliance or in the cloud, HANA combines software components from SAP optimized on hardware provided by the company?s partners.
HANA is designed to combine database and application platform capabilities in-memory to facilitate transactions, analytics, text analysis, predictive and spatial processing to help business users in simplify complicated real-time operations.
