Cardenuto told journalists in Brazil this week that in the first quarter of 2012 SAP had sold half of the number of RDS implementations that it sold in the whole of 2011. SAP implemented 120 RDS solutions in 2011.

"Some markets, such as the UK and the US, are very cloud orientated. We don't see that in Latin America," said Cardenuto.

"They might think that they are using cloud with things like Google or email, but it's not mission critical applications. If you are looking at mission critical applications it's still not there."

He added: "I think it's going to grow and get traction eventually, but it won't be this year or next year."

Cardenuto explained that this was due to a mix of cultural expectations of what IT should deliver, where CIOs aren't happy with data being stored outside of LATAM regions, and also a lack of infrastructure, where networks and fibre are not good enough to support off-site implementations.