Read this this article in Forbes today. Also managed to get a look at how SAP is selling cloud with on premise.
First the leadership…clearly the business is having a tough time embracing the cloud culture. 3 leaders in 12 months, it’s just not working. When this happens it’s usually because the culture just doesn’t work with the new thought process and ideas needed for the new world order of cloud. Larry knew that Netsuite inside oracle would suffer a similar fate…so, he liberated it to be its own thing, that’s great foresight.
On how the SAP partner community sells cloud…it’s fake cloud extreme, and a very very long way from the multi tented full service solution offer by Netsuite. Hosting a on premise solution on Amazon and accessing it with Remote Desktop means you get a few benefits like ‘no hardware in your office’ but you don’t get liberated from the administrative hassle of running the application layer, the database layer and the OS layer. With Netsuite you just run your business!
The economics are very difficult to beat when you’re honest with your evaluation.