SAP headquarters in Walldorf
The German group is in talks with the EU Commission President, the French head of government and the federal government about a European cloud.
Frankfurt The Walldorf-based software company SAP is in talks with the European Union as well as the German and French governments about setting up a central European cloud. “It is conceivable that a cloud will be built in Brussels, to which the German and French cloud will be connected and which will then be open to other member states,” said SAP CEO Christian Klein in an interview with the magazine “Wirtschaftswoche” published on Friday. To this end, he is in talks with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron and the federal government.
In 2019, the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology launched the “Gaia-X” cloud initiative to make Europe independent of American and Chinese IT providers. Several European states and companies wanted to join. SAP is also involved in this.
But the project is not going fast enough for Klein: “The time factor actually plays an important role. The alliance has been too slow for us so far. It also makes little sense that individual clouds are now being built in all 27 EU member States.“
In Germany, SAP is already working on the “Sovereign Cloud”, a cloud for the German public sector. “It’s no secret that Germany has a lot of catching up to do in the field of digitization – but instead of moving forward in an agile way, the next working group is often founded and discussed theoretically. We can’t wait for that,“ Klein said. SAP is therefore already setting up data centers in Berlin, where the data from the “Sovereign Cloud” will be processed and stored.
