Microsoft has signed huge cloud deal with SAP, good for the next three years, which will see the House of Azure helping customers of the German software giant bring their data to the cloud platform.
And with this new partnership, the two companies hope, one of the most common pain points for SAP customers will be resolved. That being, the challenging move from the on-premise SAP model to remote servers up in the cloud.
Simply put, moving data to the cloud may be about to get a lot easier for SAP users.
SAP confirmed that it struck this deal in its recent third quarter financial update, which also saw the leading software maker on the planet report a 28% jump in profit. The partnership even has a name, and will be known as Embrace.
Nice!
SAP co-CEO Jennifer Morgan explained how the company’s team up with Microsoft will work, in call with investors, saying:
“Microsoft will bundle SAP cloud services into a bundle we call Embrace, and they’ll sell these directly through their field organization to their customers who will run SAP the in the Azure cloud.”
All said and done, Microsoft is expected to contribute 18 percentage points to a 39% year-over-year growth for its cloud bookings.
That said, while this deal will see Microsoft and SAP work together to help businesses move their data to the cloud, it is not an exclusive partnership. SAP has cleared that it will continue working with other cloud provider like Amazon and Google in order to provide more options to its user base.
But SAP and Microsoft have been getting closer and closer, in recent times.
The company worked with Redmond in the past, when both SAP and Microsoft joined hands with Adobe to announce a partnership designed to take the massive amount of data generated by their customers and bring it together into one package running on Azure.
It does come at a rather interesting point in time, though.
SAP recently went through a major leadership change that saw CEO Bill McDermott step down. He was replaced by co-CEO Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein who will now lead the company forward.
