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Comment by acivitillo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

Is Hetzner even interested in offering anything other than VPS? There are many companies in Europe that offer a much more cloudy/managed approach, like Scaleway or STACKIT. Hetzner has object storage now but nothing else really.

Hetzner has really important features than AWS/Azure/GCP do not have.

My favourite is simplicity. I can understand its Cloud offering in minutes, use it to its full potential within hours to solve business problems. Back when I worked for an AWS-based unicorn, AWS took lion's share of my time.

My second favourite is the ability to move resources between accounts. The effort my fellow colleagues spend now for such migrations is enormous, and they justify it by saying that even AWS can not do this without destroying/recreating resources and copying data.

>My favourite is simplicity

It's easy to be simple when you have almost no products to sell.

Simplicity is their main objective and the main differentiator from the Merchants Of Complexity.

Looking at Scaleway, I think this strategy paid off.

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...

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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

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

As someone from a country that supposedly uses billion as 1e12, the last time I've seen anyone do it was 2005, and that was in a book from the 1960s.

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

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"

Thanks!

> 20 Milliarden Euro

Yep, so the source uses the long scale "milliard" and the translations use short scale "billion", it checks out.

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

Short form is the norm these days all over Europe.

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