SAP announced today that it is launching new versions of its enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and NetWeaver data warehouse offerings through the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service. What this means is that all these mission-critical enterprise applications will be available through a managed cloud service that users access online. This promises to reduce companies' sometimes enormous investments in ERP deployments, accelerate time to value for these systems, and enhance scalability versus on-premises deployments.

The fact that SAP is testing a cloud-based ERP deployment is not surprising. What might raise eyebrows is the fact that Dr. Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP's executive board, told the New York Times: “At some point in the future, complex implementations [of SAP products] should go away. All of our products are moving to HANA.”