Fellow CEOs Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Bill McDermott of SAP teamed up earlier this week to announce a further integration of their cloud offerings, in a bid to provide enterprise customers with a clearer roadmap.
SAP’s private managed cloud service, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud will be offered on Microsoft Azure, allowing customers to run the suite in a secure, managed cloud. According to the companies, the offering will provide “the best of both worlds” – application management and product expertise from SAP and a global intelligent cloud from Microsoft.
Barry Simpson, senior vice president and chief information officer, The Coca-Cola Company, has spoken in support of the development.
“The strategic partnership announced between Microsoft and SAP is an extremely important development for the Coca-Cola System,” he said. “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.”
Nadella and McDermott also announced their intention adopt each other’s cloud solutions internally – Microsoft will deploy SAP S/4HANA on Azure to help run its internal financial processes, as well as connect S/4HANA to Azure AI and analytics services for more efficient and financial reporting and decision-making. SAP plans to move more than a dozen of its key internal business-critical systems, which run on S/4HANA, to Azure, including the software supporting Concur.
The projects will be documented and used to provide guidance to other customers for deployment of SAP applications on Azure.
“As technology transforms every business and every industry, organisations 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.”
“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.”