At SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando this week, SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to the stage together to discuss an expanded partnership between the tech giants.
The partnership will encompass support for the SAP HANA platform, including S/4 HANA, deployed on Microsoft Azure; integration of Microsoft Office 365 and cloud solutions such as Concur, Fieldglass, SuccessFactors and Ariba from SAP; and provide enhanced management and security for custom SAP Fiori apps through Microsoft Intune.
These integrations will be available starting in the third quarter of 2016.
“At Microsoft, we are focused on empowering organisations to advance their digital transformations,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.
“Together with SAP, we are bringing new levels of integrations between our products that provide businesses with enhanced collaboration tools, new insights from data and a hyper-scale cloud to grow and seize new opportunities ahead.”
“We believe the IT industry will be shaped by breakthrough partnerships that unlock new productivity for customers beyond the boundaries of traditional platforms and applications,” said McDermott.
“SAP and Microsoft are working together to create an end-user experience built on unprecedented insight, convenience and agility. The certification of Microsoft Azure’s infrastructure services for SAP HANA along with the new integration between Microsoft Office 365 and cloud solutions from SAP are emblematic of this major paradigm shift for the enterprise.”
Choice on HANA maintenance, new hybrid and SME offerings
SAP also announced the latest release of the SAP HANA platform, which includes a new hybrid data management service in the cloud, an expanded maintenance strategy and a new offering for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs).
Among the features of the new platform are graph data processing, and capture and replay of live IT workloads. IT organisations will also be able to choose between consistent maintenance of their SAP HANA software environment for up to three years, or adopting SAP HANA innovations twice a year.
SAP has also announced an invitation-only beta program to allow certain customers to get hands-on access to hybrid data management services in the cloud, offering lower total cost of ownership by requiring less hardware infrastructure and rapidly integrating cloud and on-premise deployments.
“Our new beta program breaks down the traditional silos of on-premise and cloud, allowing customers to freely use both approaches for greater agility,” said Daniel Schneiss, senior vice president and global head, SAP HANA Platform and Databases, SAP.
“The true hybrid model allows organisations to test the impact of IT system change requirements in the cloud before committing the upgrades to an on-premise environment — ultimately promoting cost-effective IT management. We designed the program in close collaboration with our customers to shape the next wave of data management services in the cloud.”
SAP has also released a low price point version of SAP HANA – Edge edition – designed for SMEs. Supporting a 32 GB database and 128 GB of dynamic tiering, the new version is packaged with SAP Predictive Analytics.
Spring HANA Cloud Platform update announced
SAP also announced innovations to be included in the Spring 2016 edition of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, such as an API hub; prebuilt extensions for applications based on SAP S/4HANA; enhancements to the SuccessFactors extension package; new lines of business and mobile apps from partners, such as IBM MobileFirst for iOS and MacroMicro Org Insight, and added services such as a beta edition of Cloud Foundry, and the cloud edition of SAP Fiori.
SAP is also offering a promotional program for June 2016 to enable customers to use the SAP HANA Cloud Platform for a significantly reduced price for 12 months. More information is available at https://hcp.sap.com/sapphire/promo.html.
