20 billion to conquer regulated and public sectors

SAP will invest more than €20 billion over a decade to strengthen its digital sovereignty product offering, which is now being expanded to continental Europe.

The goal is to offer European customers full control over their data and infrastructure, with solutions that guarantee data sovereignty, operational, technical, and legal, while also allowing them to benefit from the evolution of artificial intelligence.

“Sovereignty is no longer optional, it is imperative,” said Thomas Saueressig, SAP administrator and chief information officer , at a conference following the presentation of this enhanced offering.

The purpose of SAP, the largest European technology company by market capitalization, is to win clients in the public sector and highly regulated sectors, such as defense, a sector in which the European Union (EU) plans to invest 800 billion euros over the next four years. With this positioning, SAP now competes directly with major North American players, which have also recently introduced sovereign cloud solutions. In this case, being a European company offers an advantage in adapting to the stricter regulations on this side of the Atlantic.

Thomas Saueressig highlights the current geopolitical situation, marked by antagonism between different trading blocs, and the need to find platforms that allow the use of artificial intelligence innovations as catalysts for investment. He argued that sovereignty and innovation are not mutually exclusive concepts and must evolve in parallel.

In the United States, the company has been making this type of offering available since 2021, through SAP National Security Services, for customers with national security requirements.

The United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have been using SAP Sovereign Cloud through partner hyperscalers (data centers) as well as the Sovereign Cloud On-Site model since 2023.

In Europe, SAP Sovereign Cloud began to be available in February of this year and has now been expanded with SAP Cloud Infrastructure (infrastructure as a service) and SAP Sovereign Cloud On-Site in selected or customer-owned data centers.

Portugal is not yet covered by this reinforcement. "Its implementation will depend on the specific digital sovereignty needs of our customers," an official company source explained to Jornal Económico. However, as a member of the European Union, Portugal can now access these services through SAP data centers located in the EU, "with all the compliance and security guarantees required by European legislation," he added.

The market reacted downwards, but in a moment of widespread decline, it recovered immediately.