Microsoft announced yet another partnership with SAP to offer customers with integrated offerings so that they can drive more business innovation in the cloud. The companies also announced deploying each other’s cloud services internally and co-engineering and jointly marketing the integrated offerings.
“As technology transforms every business and every industry, organizations are looking for the right platforms and trusted partners to help accelerate their digital transformation,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Building on our longtime partnership, Microsoft and SAP are harnessing each other’s products to not only power our own organizations, but to empower our enterprise customers to run their most mission-critical applications and workloads with SAP S/4HANA on Azure.”
As per the deal, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, the private managed cloud service of SAP, will now leverage Microsoft Azure Cloud, allowing customers to run the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system of SAP called S/4HANA directly on Azure.
Microsoft will use SAP S/4HANA to run its internal financial processes, and connect it to Azure AI and analytics services for better financial reporting.
On the other hand, SAP will migrate its internal business-oriented systems on Azure for more efficiency, flexibility and innovation that the platform offers.
SAP Ariba, a SAP SE company, which currently uses Azure, will expand the use of Azure within its procurement applications. SAP’s another company Concur will also utilize Azure cloud.
“We are taking our partnership to the next level with this new capability to run SAP S/4HANA in the Microsoft Azure environment,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott. “The world’s significant businesses trust Microsoft and SAP. Together, we will help companies win the customer-driven growth revolution.”
Both the companies plan to offer customers the best of both worlds- SAP’s application management and product expertise, and Azure’s trusted and intelligent cloud.
The leading enterprise customers from all industries including Coca-Cola, Columbia Sportswear, Coats and Costco Wholesale Corp., etc. said that the expanded partnership will help them boost their business and cloud strategies.
With this partnership, Microsoft is looking to beat AWS which is the top public cloud platform, comprising over 50% of the current cloud market.