SAP will host its enterprise apps on Google Cloud

Enterprise software vendor SAP has announced a strategic partnership with Google Cloud at the Google Cloud Next ’17 conference in San Francisco, with an aim to help global enterprises run their businesses on a highly secure public cloud with best in class flexibility, scalability, and speed. With this partnership, the company has announced the general availability of SAP HANA on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to deliver real-time insights and run mission-critical applications and analytics on a scalable and secure cloud infrastructure. GCP will provide an automated provisioning capability of certified SAP HANA instances to deliver enterprise-grade security, high availability, disaster recovery, and scalability.

“We will make use of the Google Cloud Launcher Marketplace, Google’s marketplace for enterprise-grade partner applications, to offer products to developers and customers, starting with the developer edition of SAP HANA, express edition,” noted Bernd Leukert, Member of the Executive Board, Products & Innovation, SAP.

SAP is also planning to expand its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering by making its cloud platform available on GCP. According to Leukert, Google is a frontrunner in topics like containerization and scalable data processing and the SAP Cloud Platform unit will work closely with Google on making technologies such as Kubernetes work for enterprise workloads.

SAP and Google to strengthen IaaS solutions

As another element of this partnership, the duo is collaborating to offer data visibility and data custodian capabilities, leveraging SAP’s expertise in governance risk and compliance initially. The intent is to extend GCP’s set of existing capabilities through jointly developed solutions that bring global visibility and access control to SAP’s customers for improved governance, risk and compliance management.

Improving enterprise productivity

SAP identified G Suite as an important enterprise productivity suite both its marketplace and customer base. It has integrated Gmail and Google Calendar to give customers the ability to emulate day-to-day business processes to increase user productivity and enhance flexibility and usability. The company’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution is also integrated with Google Suite and GCP. This allows customers to easily and securely connect SAP with Google Suite or GCP and give access to their users to any application from any device at any time.

“With the size, scope, and scale of both our companies, we see a great opportunity to completely transform the way end-to-end business processes and enterprise software are run in the digital economy. And this is only the start. With machine learning becoming increasingly important, SAP and Google will also collaborate in this area, taking full advantage of the business and technology capabilities of both industry leaders,” added Leukert.

Google has invested $30 billion in the Google Cloud Platform to leverage its machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. It has also acquired data science startup Kaggle which is home to a large community of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts. While this might be a talent acquisition spree, Google can unquestionably benefit from the startup’s machine learning experience.