Microsoft and SAP on Monday announced that their two-decade relationship is to enter a new phase with a partnership designed to improve big data, cloud computing and enterprise mobility.
The first and fourth-largest software companies in the world have come up with a deal that will have SAP’s popular enterprise apps available on Microsoft’s cloud, Azure soon. The companies claimed that Microsoft and SAP jointly serve 75 percent of enterprise businesses.
With this move, SAP Mobile Platform, Business Suite software, Adaptive Server Enterprise, Business All-in-One solutions and the developer edition of the HANA platform will be certified for Azure by the end of June.
“This means customers will be able to get the mission-critical benefits of SAP software – used by 86 percent of the global Fortune 500 – on our enterprise-grade public cloud,” Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of cloud and enterprise marketing at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.
“They will be able to move existing applications and services, or deploy new ones in minutes using the SAP Cloud Appliance Library tool, to Azure and benefit from nearly unlimited computing capacity.”
“We find the Microsoft (relationship) compelling because it wraps together things beyond the cloud,” said Kevin Ichpurani, Senior Vice President with SAP.
The companies also announced that Microsoft Excel is connected to SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions via Microsoft’s Power BI platform. In addition, SAP has also rolled out the Gateway app for Microsoft, designed specifically to help users access SAP applications and data through Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft and SAP also announced that the companies will be developing and co-marketing SAP mobile apps for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1, which will be managed and secured by SAP Mobile Secure or Windows Intune. The companies also noted that an enhanced SAP software development kit for Windows Phone 8.1 will be available by next year.
