It’s official: SAP® and Microsoft Azure are ending the Embrace partnership that gave Azure “preferred” status for customers running S/4HANA in the cloud. Instead, SAP has a new message for its customers: run your SAP S/4HANA and other enterprise applications wherever you want.

SAP’s decision to unwind its arrangement with Azure reassures customers that SAP is there to support them no matter where they choose to host their applications. It gives SAP greater freedom to show customers a wider range of partnerships, technology integrations, and other ways to leverage their Cloud investments.  And it will clear the way for SAP to promote RISE with SAP, its new hosted, subscription-based offering, across all three hyperscale Clouds.

And for Google Cloud in particular, there will be more opportunities to show SAP customers how to use the Cloud as a platform for innovation and growth.

All of these changes, however, begin with one fact: SAP customers see choice and flexibility as a major part of the cloud value proposition. A recent study drives home this point: 92% of enterprises are now implementing multi-cloud strategies, and the same enterprises run workloads across an average of 2.6 public Clouds.*

Those numbers reflect the reality of today’s cloud as a dynamic and rapidly evolving environment — one where the idea of a “preferred” Cloud no longer resonates with most enterprises.

The true payoff here depends on which choices SAP customers make. As a Premier Google Cloud partner, we’re excited to see more customers discover Google Cloud because we know what they’ll discover: powerful and unique AI/ML capabilities, advanced analytics, real-time processing for massive datasets, and an ideal platform for building modern cloud-native applications, among many other capabilities.

We love to share customer stories that show how Google Cloud walks the walk when it comes to delivering value. Cost-cutting is an important part of this value story — most Managecore customers cut their operational costs by 30%-40% when they run SAP on Google Cloud — but it’s not the whole story. For example:

  • One Managecore customer, FFF Enterprises, currently runs its SAP environment on Google Cloud 80% faster than it did in a private Cloud .
  • Another customer, BK Medical, migrated its SAP environment to Google Cloud that included a 680GB database and two data warehouses, along with a single sign-on implementation. The migrations were so smooth that many users never noticed that they had occurred — and the company proceeded to hit aggressive uptime and MTTR goals running SAP on Google Cloud.
  • Yet another of our customers, Pega, completed its SAP migration to Google Cloud in just nine weeks — and as an encore, Pega integrated its SAP HANA environment with BigQuery to transform its customer analytics capabilities.

Finally, looking ahead, we think RISE with SAP will be an important part of this story — giving customers new choices for how they run SAP in addition to choosing where to run their SAP applications. That’s why we recently introduced ManagecoreiQ+ on RISE with SAP: a seamless collaborative support offering that includes advisory services, monitoring, SAP security services, and many other capabilities to complement a RISE with SAP solution running on Google Cloud.

Today, we’re excited to see SAP committing itself to a path that puts customers first and gives them new options for success in the cloud. And we can’t wait to see more SAP customers discover Google Cloud’s potential as a platform for growth and innovation. It all adds up to a great future for SAP customers making their move to the cloud.

For more information about Google Cloud’s expanded partnership with SAP, please visit:

Google Cloud’s Blog >>> https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/sap-google-cloud/sap-and-google-cloud-expand-their-partnership 

Google Cloud’s Official Press Release >>> https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2021/0729/sap-google-cloud

SAP’s Official Press Release >>> https://news.sap.com/2021/07/google-cloud-and-sap-accelerate-business-transformations-cloud/

 

*https://www.flexera.com/blog/cloud/cloud-computing-trends-2021-state-of-the-cloud-report/

 

Frank Powell
About the Author:

Frank Powell

Partner/President
Frank is an experienced Information Technology executive that excels in high-level strategic and operational guidance to help manage and grow businesses. With 25 years experience in IT and over 19 of those years specifically in SAP, his thought leadership on industry trends, process improvement and best practices at SAP events, conferences and educational webinars are invaluable assets for companies. Frank provides his past experience in developing new technology initiatives with ever-evolving innovations to grow businesses and achieve high-performing solutions at a lower cost of ownership for your company.