At the EuroCloud Congress 2011, SAP served up ‘success in the cloud’ for the knowledge-hungry attendees. Rainer Zinow, SAP’s product strategy chief for Business ByDesign and the On Demand family of enterprise cloud applications, set out the four dimensions that SAP sees as fundamental to success with cloud apps. Here’s what he had to say about it:

• Cloud ops and infrastructure. “You must have at the bottom a rock solid infrastructure — and invest a fortune to get there,” he said. The presentation included a video emphasising the scale of investment that SAP has put into building its own resilient on-demand data center, with enough diesel fuel and coolant to survive a two-week power outage.
• On demand solutions. “You must build native cloud applications,” he said, admitting that SAP had previously invested in a hybrid architecture that had not worked out. That strategy has now been abandoned, he said. “What we are designing as SAP’s applications for the cloud, we’ve not taken a single line of source code from our existing applications.”
• Co-innovation and ecosystem. “You must take partners with you,” said Zinow. SAP’s previous technology generation took maybe 15 years to create, he said. There is not the same breathing space today. “This time we believe we have three, maximum five years and we have to take our partners with us. Having a platform on which partners can build their businesses is equally important.”
• New ways to sell or buy. “Cloud computing allows you to do business independent of the size of your company,” he said. Citing the examples of eBay, Amazon, he said, “What e-business did for the retail industry, cloud computing will do for any type of company.”

Expect more updates from the EuroCloud Cogress shortly.
[via Phil Wainright’s blog on Zdnet.com]