At the SAP Sapphire 2019 conference, SAP revealed it plans to launch this week Project Embrace, an initiative through it will provide a more prescriptive approach to guiding customers toward working with a preferred set of channel partners to deploy S/4 ERP applications on public cloud platforms from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, or Google.
At the same time, SAP is signaling that it will push new S/4 customers toward one of these clouds, while also working with customers that want to migrate away from the cloud infrastructure platform that SAP employs to provide its own managed instance of S/4 applications to redeploy those ERP applications on either AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
The decision to launch Project Embrace is recognition that SAP on its own will not be able to deliver infrastructure services at price points that are competitive with hyperscale cloud platforms, and that many customers increasingly prefer to aggregate as much of their data on a single cloud platform as much as possible, says Jennifer Morgan, president of the Cloud Business Group and executive board member at SAP.
“Customers are telling us we all need to work together in a new way,” says Morgan.
As part of Project Embrace, SAP and the three major providers of cloud services are developing a set of prescriptive reference architectures for deploying S/4 and the HANA in-memory database on a public cloud. SAP will then work with partners participating in its Global Strategic Service Partners (GSSP) program to help customers implement those best set of practices.
SAP expects that customers will primarily signal which cloud service providers and partners they will prefer to work with, especially in vertical industries where one partner has demonstrated ongoing expertise.
Among cloud service providers, however, Morgan says Microsoft is demonstrating the most enthusiasm for working with SAP to drive S/4 applications on to a public cloud.
As part of that expanding cloud relationship, Microsoft at Sapphire today also announced it is making available six and 12 TB virtual machines for the SAP HANA database along with a bare-metal instance of Intel Optane to provide access to four-socket servers configured with 9TB memory instance and a preview of an eight socket server configured wit, 18TB memory instance. The two companies also revealed that SAP’s machine learning capabilities will leverage Azure Cognitive Services, now available in preview as a set of containers, for face recognition and text recognition.
SAP is also making available SAP Data Custodian, a SaaS offering, on Microsoft Azure and Azure Backup for SAP HANA as a public preview, and integration between Azure Active Directory and SAP Cloud Platform also as a preview.
Instances of S/4 running on Azure will be able to be more easily integrated with other applications, such as Microsoft Office 365, when all the data a customer has resides in the same cloud, notes Judson Althoff, executive vice president of the Worldwide Commercial Business organization at Microsoft. SAP last year in collaboration with Microsoft and Adobe Systems announced an ambitious effort to collaborate on a common data model for their applications.
The goal now is to reduce the amount of friction that currently exists whenever SAP and Microsoft are in front of the same customer, says Althoff.
“There are too many variables,” says Althoff. “There are too many options.”
How all that newfound willingness to cooperate plays out in the channel naturally remains to be seen. But the one thing SAP is making clear is that it wants many more instances of S/4 running on a public cloud somewhere at much higher rates than they are today.
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