Flexibility, scalability, speed accelerated: an update on the SAP and Google partnership

In March this year, we announced that SAP and Google have teamed up to offer customers openness and cloud choice. As boundaries between B2B and B2C markets blur, this partnership addresses the growing demand from businesses to tap into large volumes of new types of data that provide an unprecedented level of transparency and value to companies and consumers.

There are many great examples of “disruptors” with innovative and radically new business models that have turned industries such as travel, music, and media on their heads. But while these success stories often involve consumer-facing start-ups, a new phenomenon is becoming evident: As business models are reimagined and entire value chains digitalized, it’s technology for enterprises that is driving innovation and questioning the status quo.

At SAP, we strongly believe enterprise is the new black. Reinventing the fundamentals of comprehensive business technology to create groundbreaking new solutions to back-office problems is what is driving and enabling the digital transformation.

Enterprises in the digital economy have the power to benefit from ecosystems that are now stronger than ever in a highly connected world. It’s no longer simply an option to partner, but a must – only by combining forces can we take our customers to the next level.

Teaming up among cloud giants

SAP is a proud partner of all three of the largest cloud infrastructure vendors – Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. We will also continue to focus on our own fully scalable infrastructure-as-a-service offering SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with fully-managed services. By pursuing this strategy, we are offering a broad and flexible portfolio across the choice of platforms.

At SAPPHIRE NOW, the world’s largest conference for SAP customers, Diane Greene, SVP Google Cloud, will join me on stage to share insights about our work together. During the keynote, we explain the many ways in which our two organizations are extending and expanding our strategic partnership. To ensure our customers and the ecosystem can understand our joint vision, I would like to share some highlights and the scope of our current and future collaboration with you:

We extend our partnership to deliver results: Combine deep business expertise and innovation in the cloud.

• We are announcing the certification of the SAP NetWeaver technology platform for GCP, which also enables products based on the application server for ABAP, such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP Business Suite, and SAP Business Warehouse, to be run on GCP.
• We are now offering SAP HANA certification on GCP for larger instance sizes. In addition, customers are now able to use scale-out capability with the general availability of SAP HANA for SAP Business Warehouse workloads.
• With the general availability of a native connector to combine the powerful capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud (formerly known as SAP BusinessObjects Cloud) and Google BigQuery, we can connect to Google’s serverless petabyte-scale data warehouse and serve analytics use cases in SAP’s software-as-a-service analytics solution.

In addition, we will co-innovate to make enterprise applications intelligent. We will accelerate the digital business transformation for customers through the power of intelligent applications with deep technology integrations. Examples include conversational apps that guide users through complex workflows and transactions, combining SAP’s business process expertise with Google’s machine learning services, such as the Translate and Speech APIs, and the open source machine learning framework TensorFlow. In our first pilot to leverage the Google Translate solution, our collaboration will initially focus on openSAP learning platform content. Starting with subtitle and slide translation, it is our intent to enable users to access our online courses in their preferred language.

Going forward, we will deepen and broaden the scope of collaboration even further. We will also continue to collaborate on making SAP Cloud Platform available on GCP and in the areas of workplace productivity integration, data transparency and custodian services, as well as in the areas of workload containerization using the open source container scheduler Kubernetes. To drive choice and flexibility for our customers, we are also combining our considerable strengths in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain.

Through this partnership, Google and SAP are providing capabilities that make it possible to innovate in entirely new ways.

To spur innovation, together with Google we launched the Intelligent App Challenge to build applications using the joint powerful capabilities of SAP and Google Cloud Platform.

The speed with which we have increased the number of offerings now generally available and expanded upon what we had already announced back in March exemplifies our commitment to our customers. By providing the greatest flexibility and choice for their digital transformation, we are doing what enterprise technology does best – providing our customers with the foundation for innovation for continued success.

Bernd Leukert is a member of the Executive Board and head of Products & Innovation at SAP