ORLANDO, Fla. – SAP is fully embracing the public cloud as it looks to expand the reach and depth of its HANA database platform. That embrace includes the launch of a new HANA Cloud Services product and updates to its SAP Cloud Platform.

Hasso Plattner, SAP co-founder and chairman of SAP’s supervisory board, used his keynote at this week’s SAP Sapphire event in Orlando, Florida, to tout the company’s enhanced push into the public cloud space.

“The public cloud is the way to go,” Plattner said early in his address, adding that “HANA is too good to lock inside of SAP databases.” HANA is SAP’s core database platform.

Plattner said that the company had tried several times over the past 20 years to integrate cloud access into its on-prem-heavy platforms, but that those efforts never gained enough customer traction.

“I am an early adopter in the cloud and I failed,” Plattner said during a later questions-and-answer session. “Now the cloud in unavoidable.”

With the Cloud Services product, SAP will extend access of its core HANA database platform into the cloud. This will combine the in-memory technology of HANA with data virtualization results to support data management. It also includes a data lake storage tier to extend the size of managed data sets and allow current on-premises HANA users to add capacity as needed.

The first specific product to be built on the Cloud Services platform is the SAP Data Warehouse cloud. It combines heterogeneous data into a single product for easier access while maintaining an enterprises security and governance posture. Access will be through a consumption-based pay-as-you-go-pricing model.

Others to be launched include a partnership with OpenText to extend the SAP Cloud Platform with unstructured content that will initially include document management-as-a-service and plans to add integration into the SAP s/4HANA Cloud platform; and additional features driven by artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and IoT.

Combined, the Cloud Services and Cloud Platform will provide customers with access to all SAP and third-party application data, reduce data duplication, and provide a single point for security and governance management.

Plattner reiterated the importance for SAP to move faster toward the public cloud space and that he thinks customers will benefits compared to current on-prem deployments.

“The cloud is so superior I believe,” Plattner said, adding that “even a dinosaur like SAP” can make the change. “We are dancing again. You have seen our young management in development. I hope in the next six years in moving to the cloud that only a few customers will be using the ECC system on prem.”

ECC is SAP’s Enterprise resource planning Central Component software.

Plattner also views the cloud as key to driving security and system updates. He said that it’s wrong for enterprises to view updates as being too difficult and to only be dealt with on an infrequent basis, instead they need to more fully embrace the speed in which updates can be pushed into their commercial systems.

“It’s wrong to come to the conclusion that we need to maintain less,” Plattner said. “You have to go to the cloud so you can maintain it on a daily basis.”

Plattner referenced a recent Reuters story that claimed 50,000 companies were open to a vulnerability in legacy SAP systems. SAP CEO Bill McDermott was asked about that same story earlier at the Sapphire event and explained that the vulnerability was confronted by security patches issued in 2009 and 2013. McDermott added that following the Reuters story, SAP instituted a more aggressive push to make sure its customers had downloaded those patches.

Cloud is becoming an increasingly component of SAP’s multi-billion-dollar business.

The company late last month announced a strategic review of its operations that included a increased focus on its cloud business and to drive further efficiencies from its operations. That move also includes SAP further reducing its reliance on Oracle as an infrastructure provider.

However, unlike many strategic reviews, SAP’s announcement followed a strong financial quarter that bolstered its stock price to a new 52-week high. SAP posted a 48% increase in cloud revenues during the first quarter of this year compared to the same quarter last year. Those cloud revenues exceeded $1.6 billion in the latest quarter.