You can’t succeed by playing it safe; so this sounding crazy sounds like the right direction.
Klein believes that the idea of setting up countless data centers in Europe to compete with the American hyperscalers is completely nonsensical. In his view, this is not a good way to achieve digital sovereignty. What Europe needs, he says, is to use the best technology—such as AI and smart software—to produce more efficiently and improve supply chains.
digital sovereignty, when it comes to the fundamentals, starts with owning the hardware in the first place especially when
US governments ignore court rulings
and the cloud act exists.
If we should use the “best technology”, we need to get rid of SAP.
So just to help me wrap my head around it… where would that AI and smart software be hosted, then?
In the cloud, obviously
Oh, you must use AI of course! /s
Wow a CEO suggesting AI what a shock. These people are obsessed
“People” is stretching it
They themselves abandoned their cloud data centers(SAP Neo Environment) in favor of using American ones. So if you want to install a brand new SAP software you are forced to use Google, AWS or Azure
I guess every ceo of european company is in washingtons pocket
Only the big ones.
Yay, digital sovereignty!
SAP fuckin’ sucks.
Fuck SAP though. All my homies hate SAP anyway.
The little interaction I have to make with SAP is enough to convince me that it’s the most horrendous software ecosystem ever made.
It has to be a scam that locks in big companies into this crappy system and they find themselves to far in to migrate to another system without major downtime.
ERP software is always “lock in”, simply because it is unfeasable for companies to keep switching from one ERP software to another. Doing so would mean having to rework every workflow within the company, changing the software programing to be as least intrusive/different as possible.
I know from working daily with SAP’s nextmost competitor, and being usersupport within the company.
Remember to pronounce it as a word not say each letter, not S.A.P but sap, I hear they hate that
Of course this comes from a european company, who supports anti-diversity order set by the annoying orange himself
What Europe needs, he says, is to use the best technology—such as AI and smart software—to produce more efficiently and improve supply chains.
Software company’s CEO wants the money to go to his company.
After SAP rolled back its DEI guidelines after Trump issued his self-defined “anti-woke” decree, it’s maybe another step taken by SAP for fear of loosing business in the U.S.?
Maybe don’t ask sap then
Now you know it’s a good idea
Eu own cloud data centers?! Where do I sign up?
My company built one… We must be crazy…
Technically he is not wrong. Where should the scale come from? Europe also doesn’t have the software companies that would use the [cloud] data centers [and their cloud services].
The big question is why Europe was asleep while the US were building their dominating position?
[edit]
What do you mean? You think Amazon has all those AWS data centres in Europe just for themselves? You think Hetzner/OVH/Scaleway/… operate data centres just for the joy of it without having any customers? There are loads of companies in Europe you’ve never heard about, doing stuff you didn’t think was a thing at all.
They’re not used to a country with commercial competition. They think only giant companies can exist and it’s inevitable everything eats each other, because their government has no regulations, so cut them done slack I suppose.
I would’t call them cloud data centers. Those existing European data centers can’t be what the CEO is talking about when he is speaking of development.
Competition to cloud services like AWS lambda and such doesn’t exist. That’s what has to be developed and established in the market.
Competition to cloud services like AWS lambda and such doesn’t exist. That’s what has to be developed and established in the market.
Oh no, no competition to vendor lock-in, how did we manage before that?
How did we manage before cars or smartphones? AWS lambda may not be that useful but it’s only an example. The difference is the entire collection of cloud services.
Competition to cloud services like AWS lambda and such doesn’t exist.
Serverless Functions is a scam anyway.
There is some 450 million people living in the EU.
The GDP of all EU countries is about $20 trillion. There is more than enough scale in the EU.
It is strategically crucial for the EU to develop its own infrastructure. The alternative being that long term any crazy guy in Washington can pull the plug and any IP being subject to industrial espionage by default.
Who is going to finance it? Google and Microsoft barely could break into AWS market. There is a huge portfolio of services to write. 450 million is not much if the others have 4 billion customers.
It’s network effects and the winner takes it all. Google and AWS are only in rhe market because they have a ridiculous amount of money to burn and the customer relations to pry away their share of the market.
Of course it is strategically crucial. That’s why Microsoft and Google got involved. The EU is very late to the game. They must have noticed that China has built a competitor but they didn’t start moving. Europe must invest more than Oracle, who also have money and customers, but not enough.
The problem is that China has one billion customers. If Europe and USA split further it could happen that each company could be too small for the next level.
“next level” of what? Having your data mined and the plug pulled by a geopolitical rival?
It is much cheaper in the long run to host within the EU even if the economics of scale only go 20% instead of 25%. Although this ignores, how a lot of companies are looking to move back out of “the cloud” because their fees there are absurdly high.
There is no magical advantage to going with the hyperscalers and there is also no “winner takes it all”. As we saw with multiple Microsoft outages in the past year, being locked into one vendor makes you incredibly vulnerable.
Whatever is the next step, some things need scale. Google has their own AI chip. I think there are also specialized storage chips. Gates has a company for new nuclear reactors.
But that’s the next step. First somebody has to catch up and establish cloud services in an environment that is as skeptical as the comments in this thread, with less money to burn and a smaller pool of developers.
The magical advantage of hyperscaler is not price but that new business ideas can be tried much faster with no need for hardware investments. They can keep running when a moment of social media attention brings a huge amount of new customers. An outage doesn’t matter if everybody else is also down.
Of course the hyperscaler knows which apps are cash cows, as does the Android team, as do the credit card companies. Europe is not prepared for that future. As the CEO says, we can do what is left, supply chain optimizations, unless there is a fundamental change.
