SAP and Microsoft partner to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud

SAP and Microsoft Corp announced joint plans to deliver broad support for the SAP HANA® platform deployed on Microsoft Azure, simplify work through new integrations between Microsoft Office 365 and cloud solutions from SAP, and provide enhanced management and security for custom SAP Fiori® apps. This announcement was made at the 28th annual SAPPHIRE® NOW conference.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and SAP CEO Bill McDermott will take the stage together at SAPPHIRE NOW today to discuss the expanded partnership that will help organizations use the cloud to drive innovation, agility and enable new ways to work.
“At Microsoft, we are focused on empowering organizations 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 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.”
New Deployment Option: SAP HANA on the Microsoft Azure cloud
With SAP HANA on Azure, organizations across all industries will be able to deliver mission-critical applications and data analytics on a global scale with enterprise-grade security and compliance. Working together, the companies are certifying SAP HANA to run development, test and production workloads on Microsoft Azure, including SAP S/4HANA. These new offerings for SAP HANA are built to handle customers’ largest and most demanding workloads.
Early adopters of this new offering, such as Coats, Rockwell Automation and Nortek, have already experienced the benefits of deploying SAP HANA on Azure. According to Sujeet Chand, senior vice president & chief technology officer from Rockwell Automation, “The Microsoft Azure platform provides us the scalability, security and level of services needed to confidently run our most demanding SAP HANA and Big Data applications. We are excited to be an early adopter of running SAP HANA on Microsoft Azure since it is an important capability in helping us realize our vision for The Connected Enterprise and advanced data analytics.”
Cloud Services Integrations: Public Cloud Solutions from SAP and Office 365
Every day, millions of business users work in Microsoft and SAP® solutions, creating documents, reading e-mails, filing expense reports, invoicing vendors and more. New integrations between the companies will combine Office 365 communications, collaboration, calendar, documents and other data with cloud solutions from SAP, including Concur, SAP Fieldglass®, SAP SuccessFactors®, and SAP Ariba® solutions, helping employees improve their overall productivity.
At SAPPHIRE NOW, Microsoft and SAP will demonstrate several of these integrations between Office 365 and cloud solutions from SAP. These new capabilities will be available starting in third quarter of 2016, with plans to release additional integration features in the future.
Flexibility in the Cloud: Management and Security of Custom SAP Fiori Apps
SAP will enable its customers to build and deploy custom mobile hybrid SAP Fiori apps on SAP HANA Cloud Platform with an open standards plug-in framework. As part of this framework, customers can build apps that can be managed, deployed and better protected with Microsoft Intune. Using the cloud build process as part of SAP Fiori, cloud edition, app publishers will be able to embed Microsoft Intune management capabilities in their apps, leveraging the same capabilities used by Office 365 mobile apps. The integration is expected to be available in the third quarter of 2016. At SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP will demonstrate this end-to-end capability as part of SAP Fiori, cloud edition.