AWS + Google Cloud decision tool
Choose where to start, before you choose what to buy.
Answer five practical questions to identify the cloud route worth validating first across SAP, data, AI, resilience, and operating fit.
Directional, not a procurement recommendation. No contact details are collected. Anonymous response categories are sent to website analytics to measure this tool.
What the assessment weighs
The five questions are not a feature scorecard. They are the five places a cloud decision usually goes wrong in the first year, ordered by how expensive each one is to reverse.
- Primary outcome. Moving or strengthening SAP, scaling data and AI, modernising applications and balancing several priorities do not share a starting point. A programme that is really an SAP migration should not be planned as a data platform build, and the reverse happens more often than it sounds.
- Platform gravity. Existing workloads, commercial commitments, identity and collaboration choices tilt the economics before anyone opens a price list. Gravity is usually cheaper to work with than to fight.
- Operating characteristic. Service breadth, integrated analytics and AI, operating fit and portability are all defensible priorities. Only one of them can be the tie-breaker, and naming it early is what stops a comparison running indefinitely.
- Next workstream. The next concrete piece of work decides which platform you need to be competent on first. The three-year vision does not.
- Delivery capability. The capability your team already holds is the strongest predictor of how a first workload lands. A platform nobody has operated is a hiring and enablement plan attached to a technology choice.
Why the answer is rarely about features
The two heaviest inputs in this tool are not the providers at all. Where your estate already sits carries more weight than any single capability question, and what your team can already operate carries nearly as much. That weighting is deliberate. Feature gaps between the two platforms close on a release cycle, while an estate that has to be re-platformed twice, or a team learning a second control plane mid-programme, stays expensive for years.
It also means two organisations with identical technical requirements can get different results here, and both can be right. The question the tool answers is not which platform is better. It is which one you should spend your evidence budget on first.
Where each route tends to start ahead
An AWS-led start
The assessment leans towards AWS when the near-term work is a migration or resilience programme, or when breadth of service and partner ecosystem is the stated tie-breaker. That matches how most Gulf SAP estates reach us: the first workload is an existing system that has to move without interrupting the business, and the platform question is subordinate to the migration question. Gulf Medical Company’s SAP migration is the worked example, and the AWS practice page covers the delivery model.
A Google Cloud-led start
It leans towards Google Cloud when the outcome is a data product or an enterprise AI capability, or when integrated analytics is the tie-breaker. If the first real deliverable is trusted data put into operational use rather than a lift of an existing estate, that is the shorter route. SAP on Google Cloud covers the SAP-specific case, and the Google Cloud practice page covers the rest.
When neither should win yet
Where priorities genuinely span both, the assessment says so instead of manufacturing a winner. What it recommends then is a short evidence sprint that compares the two routes against the same workloads, the same controls and the same operating model, which is a very different exercise from a paper comparison of service catalogues.
What happens after your result
A result names a starting route, not a purchase. The work it points at is a discovery: the same five dimensions applied to your actual workloads, with the answers evidenced instead of assumed. That is a short engagement, and it is usually where the provider question stops being the interesting one and the operating model question starts.
Altivate is an SAP Gold Partner delivering on both platforms across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the wider Gulf, with an SAP practice that predates either cloud relationship. If you want to talk a result through, or you already know which route you are on, get in touch.
