SAP announced its second deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) yesterday. In this latest round of new, SAP said they would sell Afaria on the AWS Marketplace.

Last Friday, SAP and AWS announced that SAP customers can now deploy their SAP solutions on SAP EC2 instances in production and non-production environments for both Linux and Windows environments.

In the morning, we are to hear the big picture about the SAP cloud strategy. I am sure we will hear more about deeper tie ins to AWS. This makes tons of sense. SAP is not a systems company like Oracle or IBM. The company develops software and services. Building out hardware makes for distractions. That doesn’t mean SAP has no interest in hardware. It did invest in Violin Memory but we see that as a flash play to make for a lightning fast complement to SAP HANA. But that’s a topic for another post.

We’ll also hear from Lars Dalgaard, the founder and CEO from Success Factors. This is his first major public appearance for SAP. Lars has emerged as a dynamic force at the company. He has not been taken too kindly by some for his aggressive ways but the SAP culture is particularly conservative. We’ll see how he works an audience. My bet: he’ll be a hit. I saw him in acton in the year before SAP acquired the company. His energy is hard to detract.

But Lars potential for success won’t be all because of his passion and desire to move fast in the market. I think that’s in part due to the team he has assembled. In particular, my good friend Sameer Patel, who is working closely with Lars to bring a new social dynamic into the cloud strategy.

Here’s what Sameer said to Bloomberg:

Patel, who has advised clients like Intel Corp. (INTC) and Oracle Corp. (ORCL) on collaboration, says solutions have to tie into business processes, like customer-relationship management or material sourcing, where employees actually encounter ad-hoc problems, rather than being a blanket forum.

“You need to have the level of depth around these core processes that SAP has offered for 40 years, where social becomes more focused and works as an enabler,” said Patel, who is scheduled to discuss SAP social networking software today at the Sapphire conference inOrlando, Florida.

For a deeper view about Success Factors place in SAP’s cloud strategy, I’d again recommend reading Richard Hirsch’s analysis. He does an excellent job of analyzing the issues such as the distinctive differences between SAP ABAP PaaS, the Java PaaS and the HANA App Cloud.

Hirsch points to a number of issues with Success Factors that should be considered in context with the heavy marketing barrage we will get tomorrow:

• Will Success Factors swallow the IP from the business process apps and leverage that into a new line of business apps? Will the SaaS prevail over the PaaS?
• There is a dichotomy between PaaS apps and the HANA App Cloud environment. How do those two marry with Success Factors?
• What are the discrepancies between SuccessFactors’  technical foundation, its application focus and how both fit into SAP’s existing cloud strategy?
• What will become of Streamworks and Success Factors JAM? Will they remain independent or will there be an effort to integrate the two technoloogies?
• What is the Success Factor tie with Cloud Foundry? Will that continue?

And then there is Amazon Web Services, perhaps for me the most exciting news that shows SAP is moving to get closer to the reality of what a cloud actually represents.

All in all, it should make for another day of animated conversation at SapphireNow.