Microsoft and SAP debut new cloud, data and mobile initiatives

Microsoft Corp. and SAP AG have expanded their global partnership to deliver new solutions that are intended to help improve employee productivity, enhance workforce mobility and drive increased business value for customers and partners.

Their joint announcement on May 19 aims to extend the companies’ long-term partnership in three critical areas: enterprise cloud computing with business-critical SAP applications certification for Microsoft Azure; improved interoperability between data from SAP applications and Microsoft Office, including general availability of connectivity between SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence (BI) solutions and Microsoft’s Power BI offering; and mobile productivity with expanded development and support for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1.

“Microsoft and SAP have a great history together, and we are committed to meeting the diverse needs of our enterprise customers,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of cloud and enterprise at Microsoft. “Our expanded partnership with SAP demonstrates our continued commitment to deliver the applications and services our customers need — in their private clouds, service provider clouds, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office.”

“This has been an exciting year for one of the leading strategic partnerships in our industry,” said Steve Lucas, president of platform solutions at SAP. “For our customers, SAP and Microsoft are among the top strategic vendors relied upon to drive their business’ success. We are proud of how we listened to our customers and together developed — and will continue to develop — innovative new programs focused on the cloud, mobility, analytics and interoperability that we expect will provide unparalleled value for our customers.”

It is anticipated that by the end of Q2 2014, Microsoft and SAP will support SAP Business Suite software, SAP Business All-In-One solutions, SAP Mobile Platform, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE) and the developer edition of the SAP HANA platform on Azure. In addition, Microsoft and SAP expect that customers and developers will be able to deploy and provision a number of preconfigured SAP solutions, within minutes, directly to Azure using the SAP Cloud Appliance Library tool.

New and existing SAP customers will be able to take advantage of the “pay per use” model in Azure to reduce infrastructure costs and total cost of ownership. Customers will be able to take advantage of the compute resources in Azure to support SAP solutions and quickly scale capacity as computing requirements change, paying only for the resources used.