SAP and Microsoft will work together on engineering products as part of a major new partnership, the two companies have announced, as well as deploying each other's products internally.
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud will be available for Azure customers, allowing them to run the company's S4 HANA database products in Microsoft's cloud. Microsoft itself will be deploying these services in order to manage its internal financial processes, as well as connecting SAP's solutions to its own Azure AI and analytics tools.
SAP, meanwhile, will be moving more than 12 of its business-critical systems and processes to Azure. The company's procurement software division, SAP Ariba, is also looking at expanding its use of Azure. Both Microsoft and SAP will be publicly documenting the process in order to provide customers with leadership and guidance on the deployment of SAP services on Azure.
"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 Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
"Building on our longtime partnership, Microsoft and SAP are harnessing each other's products to not only power our own organisations, but to empower our enterprise customers to run their most mission-critical applications and workloads with SAP S/4HANA on Azure."
"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."
The partnership has been met with approval from major customers on both sides of the deal including Coca-Cola, Costco and more, who have voiced their anticipation for the accelerated pace of development that the new agreement will bring.
"The strategic partnership announced between Microsoft and SAP is an extremely important development for the Coca-Cola System," said Barry Simpson, Coca-Cola's senior vice president and CIO. "The value of aligned engineering, sales and delivery between these two strategic partners will allow our system to accelerate our digital agenda. This is a very positive and exciting development for us."
