SAP splashes €20B on Euro sovereign cloud push

https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/sap_sovereign_cloud/

by jamesblonde • 11 months ago

90 79 11 months ago

theregister.com

nottorp2• 11 months ago

I believe Europe needs affordable cloud too, not "enterprise" cloud.

sauercrowd• 11 months ago

there's a lot of affordable examples such as hetzner - what's missing?

r_lee• 11 months ago

proper IAM, networking, object store (maybe they have this now) etc..

tcldr2• 11 months ago

Hetzner's great, and I'm a customer, but we're missing lots of stuff there – and some of the stuff that is there isn't reliable.

For example:

* Object storage: lots of horror stories out there regarding flakey performance so hard to justify sticking mission critical stuff there.

* Private networking: Again, too many anecdotes about loss of service. Lots of people just using the public IP6 interfaces to avoid their private networking entirely. And private networks are IP4 only.

* Kubernetes CSI: I've had issues with this where a PV gets in some locked state and I can't remove from console.

I'd love to see more competition here.

graemep• 11 months ago

Branding. Businesses and governments are far more comfortable with the big names.

Its not just cloud. There is a lot of reliance on mobile OSes too, also American (and anything that needs updates is effectively controlled by whoever supplies the updates).

From past HN stories the EU is developing an age verification app that only works on Google attested Android or on iOS. The NHS relies on AWS. British courts use MS Teams for remote hearings. The majority of my clients (apart from some I guide elsewhere) use AWS - its the safe choice. AWS is the current "nobody ever got fired for buying X" supplier. Gmail holds the same position for email.

preisschild2• 11 months ago

Stuff like BYOIP because many of their IP ranges are blocked by lots of services, reliability issues, extremely aggressive abuse team that will threaten to block your account for a network misconfiguration, bad performance, ...

jpalomaki2• 11 months ago

Few cheaper ones that come into mind: OVH (France), Hetzer (Germany) and Contabo (Germany). At least the two first ones have data centers in few other countries as well.

nottorp2• 11 months ago

Yes, so SAP isn't doing much of a favor to Europe. More to their own pocket.

gjvc• 11 months ago

Civo (UK) might be of interest

ta1243• 11 months ago

When I think of affordable cloud, it's all european providers.

xandrius2• 11 months ago

Upcloud (Finland) is great, I'd vouch for them.

Supports lots of countries, affordable and the people there are super nice.

ExoticPearTree• 11 months ago

Europe needs something similar to what the big three hyper scalers offer so a migration of sorts can happen without too much hassle for companies who deem that data sovereignty is a live or die kind of situation.

There are a lot of small providers here and there, but they can't offer the scale of even GCP (the smallest of the bunch).

jpalomaki2• 11 months ago

This is something we need. Europe relies way too much on US companies for hosting critical apps in cloud.

In large cloud environments it's about who controls the data, not the physical location. Gigabytes of data can be transferred in seconds to other side of the world. With a flip of a switch it can be totally erased or made inaccessible even to people with physical access to the servers.

ramon156• 11 months ago

For any dutch people, Bert Hubert has been VERY vocal on this for a while, but no one wants to listen

ezst• 11 months ago

Europe relies way too much on US companies

What annoys me to no end is the temporal amnesia there is to this. Sure, yeah, true, cloud providers are practically an American cartel at this point in time. But cloud itself is a fairly novel thing in most corporate histories: we used to run most things on premise with people on payroll, and that was a single digit years ago. Moving out of the cloud is as valid an option, if not a better one, than trying to come up with a competing cartel.

7952• 11 months ago

And by just trying to reproduce something we are not offering any antidote to the issues incumbent with cloud systems. IMHO the best place to start is by offering something that can provide authentication/authorisation/ZeroTrust networking/API gateways. And ideally do it in a distributed way that can start without needing servers.

nicholasbraker• 11 months ago

If you want to compete you must also invest in associated PaaS and SaaS-services supported by a development framework to code and integrate it all. As mentioned, getting an IaaS product is not a problem now, it's about getting the developers onboard.

mr_toad• 11 months ago

getting an IaaS product is not a problem now

Isn’t it? Iaas is a lot more than just VPS and a few PaaS offerings, you need object storage, a command line and more. Last I looked the European cloud vendors were very lacking.

jumbois3• 11 months ago

SAP has the BTP and all their different products, so IaaS is very much the issue for them and I doubt they have solved it without the help of Microsoft.

pyrale2• 11 months ago

Its not just cloud. There is a lot of reliance on mobile OSes too
If you want to compete you must also invest in associated PaaS and SaaS-services supported by a development framework to code and integrate it all.

People have got to start somewhere, and they can't really take shortcuts. Messages of the type "you need to build all the spectrum of services available on big US brands ovenight" aren't really useful.

jll29• 11 months ago

I agree.

Better committing $20B now (by one player) than only talking about it and continuing to rely on others.

And while the point about OSes is also well made, there is no reason to believe that this will not also happen, albeit at a slower pace and via community mechanism rather than SAP funding.

I've seen many projects that go in that direction that have been launched. In a way, one has to 'thank' Trump for incentivising fixing something that should already be done right from the start, and which otherwise would have left undone for longer.

ojosilva• 11 months ago

I agree, this sounds like a PR piece to get SAP's cloud business, which has been drunkly taxing around the runway, to take off using "nationalistic" rhetoric, as if the UE were a nation of sorts.

Right now cloud is just at the bottom of a huge equation... There's mobile, OS, apps and AI frontier models and chips to tackle to say the least. And all that with ferocious competition from US behemoths. I just don't see that happening. If a nationalistic US government were to chop off or heavily tariff the UE on digital goods and services exports, it would probably crash markets on both sides of the pond, I don't see that happening given the UE propensity to negotiate and bend over when push comes to shove.

wg02• 11 months ago

Absolutely. One step at a time. It might seem very foolish at the moment but I see that RISC-V based mobile devices to become a reality some day with a Linux OS on top.

Might sound absurd but tell someone on 1st January 2000 on Linux kernel mailing list that one day, half of the world population would be holding Linux operating system in their hands and here we are - excluding Apple, every single device is running a Linux kernel.

rjsw• 11 months ago

DEC/Compaq/HP had working handheld systems running Linux in 2000, starting with the Itsy [1] and moving on to versions of the Compaq iPaq and HP Jornada 720. The kdrive X server was written for these machines. I was running the same software stack on a ruggedized tablet that we manufactured.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itsy_Pocket_Computer

ownagefool• 11 months ago

Sure, but a lot of this isn't super hard.

I worked on FlexiScale, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexiScale. The Architecture of IaaS provider doesn't need to look massively different from k8s.

- Node Agent that either listens or connects back to an API for instructions. - An API to request your workload. - Various decision daemons. IPAM, Block Storage, Etc.

What's missing in Europe is a Culture of Tech Leadership and Investment.

Case in point, I wrote or rewrote borderline 100% of an early European Cloud Provider, and I've never heard of nor been approached to work for another project like this. Even if one existed, they likely wouldn't come anywhere near offering a salary I'd be interested in, and leadership would almost certainly be full of people who haven't built a Cloud Provider before.

( This isn't so say I'm the most credible candidate in the market, but I have had salaried offers for IC in Meta and HFT in London. I'd have loved to build another cloud provider ( with more than a team of 3-5 ) but I've spent most of my career as a contractor interfacing with "cloud" teams offering things like vsphere, wondering where it all goes wrong. )

pyrale2• 11 months ago

What's missing in Europe is a Culture of Tech Leadership and Investment.

Yeah... I wonder if that culture of investment comes from people all over the world giving money to US companies so they can invest. I guess, once they've alienated all of their economic partners to the point sales only happen forced at gunpoint, we'll find out that this "culture of tech leadership and investment" was always an abundance of cash derived from a global market.

epolanski2• 11 months ago

What's missing in Europe is a Culture of Tech Leadership and Investment.

Europe is really risk adverse, yet technology by its very nature require you to experiment and fail more than you succeed.

acivitillo• 11 months ago

Is 20b euro enough to be a real alternative? Just a question. The thing with managed services in customer infra is interesting… but I am afraid it is motivated by the fact that many customers are not interested in paying SAP Cloud over their currently working SAP on premise setup. Let’s also keep in mind this is the company that has rarely embraced open protocols, built lots of proprietary stuff (abap…) and rarely cares about good APIs. How they should build a proper PaaS, with what skills, culture, know how, should be the question.

theshrike793• 11 months ago

It's the Excel thing. Excel has a ton of features.

Everyone only uses 10% of them and complains that it'd be a lot simpler to use if the 90% went away.

But everyone uses a different 10% of it =)

The same is true with cloud offerings. There's no way to force full feature parity with AWS without a trillion euro investment.

But can they find the 10% that is enough for the relevant users? The ones that can't for legal and privacy reasons have their data exist physically in the US or even within US companies.

epolanski2• 11 months ago

This excel-aws comparison is asinine.

A better one would be Microsoft 365 and AWS.

Sure migrating out of Excel might be difficult, but migrating out of PowerPoint, Teams or SharePoint? Not necessarily.

In fact, migrating out of EC2 or S3 is almost trivial as most competitors even offer identical APIs.

Also, any company that is so vendor locked is asking for trouble and huge bills.

quectophoton2• 11 months ago

Is 20b euro enough to be a real alternative?

Since we're talking about Europe, my first instinct here is that I want to double-check what they mean by "billion"[1].

This article being in English makes me assume short scale, but SAP being German makes it possible (even if unlikely) that it could be a mistranslation that everyone else just copied.

If only any of these articles could link to a source. But searching for literal quotes doesn't seem to return any authoritative source, or even any transcripts (if this was announced verbally).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#German-s...

rich_sasha• 11 months ago

Indeed, Continental billion is 1e12, not 1e9.

The idea of SAP spending 20e12 EUR seems hard to believe.

scopendo• 11 months ago

The alternative of 10^12 (trillion) seems a stretch to say the least.

_zoltan_3• 11 months ago

here is the original announcement: https://news.sap.com/germany/2025/09/sap-souveraene-cloudang...

and the relevant quote: "Durch eine langfristige Investition von über 20 Milliarden Euro setzt SAP einen klaren strategischen Fokus auf digitale Souveränität."

"more than 20000 million euros"

dogma1138• 11 months ago

They aren’t not spending the GDP of the EU on a cloud.

Short form is the norm these days all over Europe.

_zoltan_3• 11 months ago

20B over 10 years. so 5 million EUR now, and then let's forget this next year...

even if they truly spend 20B over 5 years, it's nothing.

realusername• 11 months ago

The money isn't the problem here but the engineering culture is.

20 billions in the pocket of Hertzner or OVH to build a cloud, I believe it but 20 billions with SAP, I don't.

carlmr• 11 months ago

True, but Hetzner doesn't have that money to spend.

bjackman• 11 months ago

It's impossible to say because unfortunately the article doesn't actually say anything about what the hell they're claiming to build.

Is 20B enough to offer a competitor to AWS? Not a chance in hell. But that specifically say that's not what they're offering.

The only other meaning I can assign to "cloud" is IT infrastructure. I think you can easily compete with Google Workspace for 20B. But I think that's probably not what they meant, I think they just meant "here are some buzzwords and a big number, please write an article about us".

(The other meaning for "cloud" that you can obviously build for 20B is something like Hetzner. But... We already have that).

Anyway, there are obviously pretty serious things you can build for 20B and it's probably good if we try to build some of them in Europe...

jumbois3• 11 months ago

StackIT is Germanys best shot at a sovereign cloud currently. Basically a fork of OpenStack.

I very much doubt SAP has the competence to replicate this. I'll also bet those unnamed open-source technologies are mostly sprinkled on top of proprietary Azure tech, like the rest of their infrastructure.

yokaze• 11 months ago

SAP also uses Openstack.

jumbois3• 11 months ago

There's probably few technologies SAP doesn't use. That's a long way off from all of these cloud offerings being based on OpenStack though.

I doubt thats the case.

_zoltan_3• 11 months ago

I've been deep into the OpenStack ecosystem and community from around 2011 to 2022 and I have to tell you that besides the steep learning curve it's a great system.

why you'd want to fork it it beyond me.

blablabla123• 11 months ago

I heard in some lines of work at SAP people get paid to sit in lobbies the first half year

redwood• 11 months ago

20B over ten years compared to AWS alone putting >100B in capex this year alone

xandrius2• 11 months ago

Never enough it seems.

IsTom• 11 months ago

SAP cloud sounds like the last thing you want to use if you value your sanity.

tonyhart72• 11 months ago

seems like they have new competition for worse interface provider

mrtksn• 11 months ago

Hypothetically, if the AI is indeed able to improve efficiency Europe should be able to replicate the US IT efforts at the fraction of the original cost. Not only that but we already know what works, so no cost for the dead ends too.

A bit like SpaceX doing rocketry with modern CAD and computing power. It’s much cheaper and faster iteration from what NASA had to deal with.

The problem is, the European mindset towards software. Maybe Americans doing it in Europe can have much greater chance.

tonyhart72• 11 months ago

Euro cloud independent is good

but SAP that want to build it??? idk about that, rather prefer OVH or Hetzner to take the helm

cyberlimerence2• 11 months ago

Realistically all the European mini-clouds like OVH, Scaleway, Hetzner, etc should collaborate and field some pan-European offering, similar to the American/Chinese mega clouds. And EU Commission, or whatever, should invest in the name of strategic competition.

mathverse2• 11 months ago

Lol. They are not paneuropean companies. All of them have different nationalities and priorities. Europeans cant work together on mega projects due to their strong nationalism.

cyberlimerence2• 11 months ago

I never said it would be easy, but if they really want it, it should be possible. Airbus, for example, is a pan-European entity, build up of French, German and Spanish companies which preceded it.

stakhanov• 11 months ago

[...] due to their strong nationalism.

The problem IMO is politics, not nationalism (which only enters into the politics indirectly). European integration is a half-done project. Political forces that want to finish the job get cancelled out by political forces that want to undo the progress we've already made with the net effect of nothing getting done in any direction, maintaining a status-quo that pretty much nobody wants, and nobody (nationalist or otherwise) ever wanted. And that status quo is that doing business in a pan-european way is a bureaucratic hellscape.

lifestyleguru• 11 months ago

You can go against the current and not be nationalist within EU, "capital has no nationality" and stuff, but then French and German capital will maul you then Dutch, Swedish, Italian, and Spanish capitals will take the rest. What will remain out of it, will have no nationality.

mathverse2• 11 months ago

As a european I dont believe in European anything. I worked for European scale-ups and they are all bunch of nationalists that primarily succeed in their primary country and then fail to expand in any other country because they meet the local alternative.

The best market to expand besides your own Euro-country is the US but tthen when you enter that market you are too small of a fish to do anything.

There is no such thing as european companies. It's german companies, french companies all mainly focused on their main markets.

wg02• 11 months ago

Every company in Europe would have some origin story and some stronghold and that's nature. I see OVH being used in Germany despite Hetzner being in place and I am sure Hetzner is being used by French market as well.

focusgroup0• 11 months ago

Given the degrowth / energy minimization policy in Germany and wider EU, how do they plan to bring online and operate new datacenters?

poisonborz• 11 months ago

"Just throw more money at the problem, bro" /every EU politician and CEO/

donperignon• 11 months ago

Money down the drain…

raffael_de• 11 months ago

Not gonna work. Even if they spend a 100 billion Euro. SAP isn't just a set of products; it's a cult, a mindset. A very narrow-minded and hyper-bureaucratic mindset. SAP is organically and systemically incapable of producing something competitive to AWS or GCP or even Azure. Especially not if you take into consideration that Amazon and Google will continue to adapt and evolve as well. SAP is a cancerous technology step by step eating its host. It's like a tick that will draw blood from a company until it spawns more ticks continuing the cycle. It's the digital equivalent to syphilis or herpes - highly contagious and eventually infesting the brain of everybody working with it for too long. It turns erstwhile well-intentioned humans into SAP-minded caricatures of a software zombie.

e1gen-v• 11 months ago

ABAP-itis

marenkay• 11 months ago

1. I find it hard to call this a sovereign cloud. This is still Azure - albeit with the crown jewels cut out - in a different dress. Did they verify there is nothing inside that Azure stack enabling calls home? 2. SAP itself is not sovereign, they're a MS shop. 3. They are no fast movers, they move short-term through acquisitions only. 4. Change is not a thing you would associate with SAP 5. A company that bungles 200 million EUR for running smartphone app for handful of years is not gonna get far with 20 billion EUR.

Sorry but the ones with the money in the bank are not the ones who will actually be concerned or capable of working towards sovereignty because its opposed to their income source.

SAP splashes €20B on Euro sovereign cloud push

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