So the rapidly evolving enterprise cloud is taking on an entirely new shape as the hard-and-fast clarity of the original cloud stratification—IaaS over here, PaaS over there, and SaaS in that other spot—begins to crumble under the enormous pressure exerted by a few different forces. Let’s look at the most-recent of those forces. SAP CEO Christian Klein is vowing to battle cloud-infrastructure heavyweights Microsoft and Google for ultimate control of customers as those two hyperscalers look to offer SAP’s cloud customers more than just infrastructure. In the old world, SAP supplied the applications, hardware companies supplied the systems that ran those applications and SAP forged the strategic relationships with customers while the hardware companies were in effect subcontractors. In SAP’s ideal world, that same model would carry over into the cloud: SAP provides the apps, and hyperscalers Microsoft, Google and Amazon supply the IaaS.

But in the actual world, Microsoft and Google offer not only infrastructure but also platform services and cloud applications. Amazon is pushing into the platform space as well. As a result, as SAP’s huge roster of big global corporations begin moving more and more mission-critical workloads to the cloud, Microsoft and Google are looking to move up the stack and offer those customers more than IaaS. And SAP’s new CEO doesn’t think much of that idea. You can read all about this major development in SAP Will Battle Microsoft & Google for Customer Control, Says CEO Christian Klein.