Microsoft and SAP are working on new solutions that are intended to help improve employee productivity, enhance workforce mobility and drive increased business value for customers and partners.
In a blog post this month, Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president, Cloud and Enterprise Marketing, at Microsoft, said that the companies which have worked together for more than 20 years, have extended their partnership to give enterprise customers increased flexibility and better insights – in the cloud and on mobile devices.
Specifically, the expanded Microsoft-SAP partnership expands the companies'joint efforts 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, Cloud & Enterprise, Microsoft, in a statement released by the company. “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.”
SAP apps on Microsoft Azure
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, Microsoft’s cloud platform.
In addition, Microsoft and SAP said they 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.
Improved data access and interoperability
Microsoft and SAP have made Excel connectivity to SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions through Microsoft’s Power BI offering generally available. Microsoft and SAP also announced plans to deepen interoperability between applications and platforms with a new version of the SAP Gateway for Microsoft, which is expected to help customers automate business processes and access SAP applications and data through Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure. Customers can get started today with the current SAP Gateway for Microsoft and upgrade to the new version when it becomes available in the second half of 2014. More information is available at SAP Gateway for Microsoft.
Increased mobile collaboration
Microsoft and SAP said will also help develop and co-market SAP mobile apps for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1. The new mobile apps will be managed and secured by the SAP Mobile Secure portfolio or Windows Intune.