Do you think SAP will come up with a cloud provider to compete with aws and the like? I don't know if there is another European software company big enough for that.
In my opinion, the issue for European "cloud" service isn't so much the infrastructure. There are already fairly large hosting companies like OVH, Hetzner…
But on the software side it's lacking. And suggesting SAP might bridge the gap for software quality would get a laugh from anyone who regularly uses their product.
My feeling about european cloud providers (OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway, Irideos) is that their main fault is not approaching their business like AWS does.
In the sense of being customer centric, offering thorough services, standardizing and operating on thin margins in order to reinvest most of their profits into the company itself.
A lot of small players in the cloud fields either offer an incomplete set of services, or adopt hardly-scalable models of operations.
If you want to at least have a chance of winning european customers concerned with data privacy and stuff from AWS you should try to replicate their pros -- offer a compelling alternative.
Not to disagree about the quality of SAP's product but realistically if not for us based cloud providers they're going to be stuck with Yandex cloud or Baidu.
They tried before with SAP Cloud Platform (that was the last name it settled after changing from SAP HANA Cloud Platform and other myriads).
They decided to back off from being a cloud provider. They got no skin (top-level don't know how to pull it off) nor skill (EU engineers aren't the best in hi-tech) in the game.
Last I saw they only tried to build a shim-layer on top of CloudFoundry to orchestrate infrastructure running on other cloud vendors.
They got zero clients for SAP Cloud Platform since their customers prefer "best of breed" (AWS/Azure). If they say they have customers, it'll be "internal" customers: SAP other divisions who used them and they charged those divisions (that's how SAP works).
Telco operators could, that also already have network capabilities too. At least in Italy they actively try to. They are definitely inefficient, so I’ve not seen any actual result, but in some other country they could succeed.
