Amazon blamed for SaaS issues at SAP

Since the Amazon outage SAP has had to, ‘work harder to make people comfortable with where cloud computing is.’

SAP blames Amazon Web Services (AWS) for difficulties the industry is having in selling software-as-a-service. And believe the outage has made it harder to convince customers of the benefits of cloud computing.

Described as ‘a tough week’, by the head of SAP’s global solutions business, it is also a lesson for all enterprises planning to move to the cloud. An IDC analyst, David Bradshaw explains.

“If a major service outage occurs, people will be worried about the availability of the services depending on it. People don’t want to find that business-dependent services cannot be accessed because of an outage.”

It all comes down to Amazon’s explanation of events, and how businesses interpret them. AWS said that a misdirected software upgrade shifted large amounts of traffic onto systems unable to deal with the load.

“If this is proved an exceptional event that is not necessarily going to be duplicated by other service providers, there will be less damage to the cloud computing industry than if the outage is seen as a problem in the general cloud infrastructure,” said Bradshaw.

SAP has had problems selling its software-as-a-service previously and was only ready for widespread deployment last year. It is no wonder that the company has come down hard on Amazon – the last thing they need is another obstacle to clamber over.