River to the cloud.

Everyone is talking about the cloud – The On-Demand-Computing. Indeed it is the next big thing in here. And due to its tremendous calibre, it is going to be here. Globalization has affected the business model in a huge manner. Organizations are forced to think and move beyond their traditional boundaries. IT in a way is the supply chain of the thoughts, rather intelligence, which feeds the movement of organizations beyond their boundaries. And cloud is going to be the new IT delivery model of the future. The organizations can now concentrate more on ‘how to use to information’ than on ‘how to get the information’

Cloud computing is a big pie. And we are here to get our share of the pie. So are the big players. Two of the very first companies to provide the cloud platform are Amazon and GoGrid. The Big blue is out with its IBM Smart Desktop and IBM LotusLive products. The social networking site FaceBook runs on Cloud. And so is the Germany based ERP giant SAP.

SAP has several cloud projects to be released in the future. One of the ready-to-be-moved projects is “River”. Well, this is not yet the official name; it’s the code name of the project. River is a cloud-computing platform that supports simple extensions to the already deployed or live ERP systems. SAP has been working on River for about 18 months, said CTO Vishal Sikka in a recent interview. River applications are meant to be simple, with only a few dozen screens or so, and are easy to put together and extend, Sikka said. Still, SAP has done "a significant amount of work" on River in areas such as data security and authentication, "which frankly have been missing in many cases in the cloud atmosphere," he said.

River would be a middleware between the existing lightweight solutions and the cloud. The first application by SAP based on river is Carbon Impact 5.0. It is set to be unveiled in near future and will be running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. “Carbon Impact can help global organizations credibly report and profitably reduce the enterprise carbon footprint” as written on SAP’s website. This product would help the organizations to maintain the carbon inventories, quantify and compare carbon intensity across your operations – by process, product, and/or facilities and reducing their carbon footprint and thus releasing more carbon credits and generating revenue out of the released carbon credits. Think of this - Carbon Impact on a Cloud- amazing futuristic product on an equally amazing and futuristic technology. I must say SAP has got some very sharp minds at top!

SAP went with Amazon at first because it has "a great expertise in this area," Sikka added. "It's a great way for us to deliver the first application, but by no means the only one." SAP is also planning to build more applications on platform behind its Business ByDesign, SAP's on-demand ERP suite for the midmarket. Business ByDesign is a SaaS solution from SAP. SAP is planning a bigger release of Business ByDesign by the end of 2010. Probably with these releases, it may also reveal some new platform for cloud! Bye the time let us wait for the River. Its yet to be seen how this river helps SAP and its customers leverage the cloud.