If you’ve read the Nerdletter in the past, you’ll see that I’m pretty openly a Google Cloud fanboy. (If this is your first one, welcome! I’m Paul, a Google Cloud fanboy.) I think GCP has understood platforms for a while now, and as a developer I’ve always loved the Google tools.
Recently SAP and Google announced a key partnership in making S/4HANA data available to Google Workspace (think Google Docs and Google Sheets). While somewhat light on details, news releases keyed on the collaborative features of Docs and Sheets. Think of your favorite old-timey WinShuttle data in Excel – now imagine that same functionality but in your browser-based spreadsheet and/or on your mobile device. I’m sure there are other features, but that’s where my mind goes first.
It’s also where I was thinking a few years ago. My old company, Mindset Consulting, released a Sheets add-on that let users take SAP Gateway OData services and bring that data into the spreadsheet for two-way viewing and editing of SAP data. The add-on is gone from the Sheets store, but you can still see the source code at the open-source repository.
There was a major stumbling block back in 2014-2015 to selling that tool: almost no companies who used large SAP installations also used Google as their productivity suite. Does this new announcement mean that situation has changed? Does Google anticipate a larger set of enterprises making the choice to run Workspace? That would completely change the equation for lots of Microsoft Excel-based SAP data solutions. PM
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