Will SAP Ever Recognize Multi-Cloud and Cloud Neutrality?

As I re-read, the Peter Pluim, President of SAP's Enterprise Cloud Services, interview with SAPinsider, entitled, Cloud Migration is More Than Just an Upgrade, it occurred to me that SAP seems present cloud in a "choose one" approach. From SAP's vantage point, it seems that once SAP is in the cloud, all SAP integration worries become easier. Clearly this is not the case as every cloud connection crosses a firewall and SAP Customers have little control over where many of their integrated applications reside (i.e. SaaS, edge, etc.). What SAP seems to miss is that nearly all SAP integrated ecosystems are and forever will likely be, multi-cloud. These ecosystems involve a lot of non-SAP applications many of which will not be managed under RISE with SAP. Cloud services are indeed the catalyst but cloud services can be consumed on-premise, in cloud-neutral colocation datacenters, or in the public cloud.

Peter states an example of how individuals are adopting cloud services like Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music and Gmail yet never mentions that this example crosses multiple clouds. In addition, in this example individuals remain cloud-neutral and retain the freedom to consume cloud services from vendors that provide them what they consider the best cloud services/best price. Peter goes on to state an example of how Office 365 marked an inflection as it is now extremely uncommon to set up Active Director or Exchange Server outside of Office 365. While those are excellent examples of what has occurred, the big question is why SAP is so silent in promoting cloud neutrality instead of promoting long-term contracts with proprietary vendor lock-in? Most large SAP ecosystems make use of more than one public cloud hyperscaler and have hundreds of non-SAP integrated applications--some of those large SAP ecosystems are deployed on-premise and in colocation datacenters and take full advantage of cloud services from multiple public clouds, SaaS providers, etc.

Isn't Cloud about choosing best of breed cloud services from any mix of vendors (with the freedom to change over time)?

SAP Account Executives are financially incented to promote RISE with SAP but, in my opinion out of ethical responsibility, should be promoting cloud services (not public cloud only) as cloud services are where the value is that Peter Pluim refers to in his interview. How many SAP Account Executives know what RISE with SAP PE CDC is? In my own questioning of SAP AEs, less than 10% know what this customer datacenter choice option is nor do they know if they get paid for selling it. Under this nearly unknown option, RISE with SAP can be hosted in the customer's choice of datacenter using the same RISE with SAP PE software code base, the same SAP services, etc. yet avoiding potential issues of vendor proprietary technology, data sovereignty/residency, etc. associated with a single public cloud hyperscaler. The most cloud-neutral option of all would be for SAP to promote deploying RISE with SAP PE CDC inside a colocation datacenter complex shared with multiple major public cloud providers on top of the Internet Exchange. See SAP's Hybrid Cloud.

If nearly all SAP integrated ecosystems involve multi-cloud, shouldn't RISE PE CDC (with customer datacenter choice) be the most highly promoted RISE with SAP deployment?

When I advise customers regarding IT investments, I remember the popularity of the managed service contracts and the difficulty and expense for exiting those agreements. It is important not to forget that cloud benefits are supposed to include agility and portability made possible by taking advantage your choice of cloud services. Retaining the power to choose what cloud services to use in conjunction with your SAP ecosystem is paramount. SAP could avoid a lot of backlash by making it more clear that SAP ecosystems can remain cloud neutral by simply adopting cloud services (in any datacenter) rather than hyping up wholesale monolithic conversions to a single hyperscale public cloud provider. It is becoming clear that, on average, for every $1 initially spent on moving SAP to a hyperscale public cloud provider, an additional unforeseen $8 is spent moving additional workloads to solve issues with integration to that cloud provider.