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SAP takes ‘ecosystem’ approach to guide S/4HANA customers moving to the cloud

SAP takes ‘ecosystem’ approach to guide S/4HANA customers moving to the cloud

Launches project ‘Embrace’ with Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and global strategic service partners

Credit: SAP

We are in a unique position to offer a portfolio of differentiating services to positively impact our customer’s journey to becoming intelligent enterprises

Jennifer Morgan, SAP

Jennifer Morgan, president of SAP’s cloud business group, explains that Embrace will put the customer’s move to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud in the language and context of their primary industry.

This will be done through recommending the platform, software, services and infrastructure from SAP, a preferred hyperscaler and a preferred service partner.

The project, called ‘Embrace’ is a collaboration with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud as well as global strategic service partners (GSSPs) to support customers moving towards the cloud.

The programme has a curated set of components:

  • Solution: A set of foundational services running on SAP Cloud Platform to enable the integration, orchestration and extension of SAP systems and third party applications running on the cloud or on premise.
  • Reference architecture: This is a jointly developed technical blueprint that incorporates the required SAP and hyperscaler components to run the customer’s applications.
  • Market approved journeys: A jointly created and market approved roadmap to SAP S/4 HANA by industry, and created with hyperscalers and CSSPs.
  • New MAX services: A new set of Max services designed to support customers running a cloud or hybrid infrastructure on a hyperscaler.

Morgan says the partnership means SAP customers will have a single blueprint to support their transition and journey towards an ‘intelligent enterprise’.

The latter is a term SAP uses for organisations that effectively use their data assets, such as automating complex processes and bringing them together under a core of master data cloud.

Morgan says SAP interviewed their top 200 customers on their plans for the cloud, and two out of three says they are planning to move to Azure.

“Our customers are very clear about the business outcomes they expect to achieve when migrating to the cloud and these include cost reduction, improved system performance and access to innovation,” says Morgan.

“Working together with hyperscalers and GSSPs, we are in a unique position to offer a portfolio of differentiating services to positively impact our customer’s journey to becoming intelligent enterprises.”

Customers will benefit from shorter negotiations, streamlined teaming and faster risk managed implementations, she says.

“Partnerships come and go, but this is different,” says Judson Althoff, executive vice president, worldwide commercial business at Microsoft, on being among the first-mover hyperscalers with Embrace.

Althoff says the programme is aligned with sales, engineering support and partners involved in the move to the cloud.

“How can we lift, shift and modernise at the same time get business impact for our customers?”

Jennifer Morgan of SAP and Judson Althoff of Microsoft during the launch of project 'Embrace' at Sapphire Now.
Jennifer Morgan of SAP and Judson Althoff of Microsoft during the launch of project 'Embrace' at Sapphire Now.

Divina Paredes attended the 2019 Sapphire Now conference as a guest of SAP

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Tags strategyMicrosoftSAPS/4HANAcollaborationSapphire Now

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