WALLDORF, Germany / HANGZHOU, China: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE:BABA) and SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced plans to offer SAP S/4HANA^® Cloud and SAP^® Cloud Platform on Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in China to help customers transition to the cloud and build intelligent enterprises. Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang and SAP CEO Bill McDermott outlined the expanded relationship today at the Computing Conference 2018 of Alibaba Group being held in Hangzhou, China.

Alibaba and SAP joined forces two years ago to deliver enterprise cloud solutions in China through Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, to help customers adapt to fast-changing market demands. Beginning today, the two companies will collaborate, co-innovate and jointly go to market to offer SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the digital cloud suite of choice to run a successful business in the cloud. Alibaba Cloud’s customers will also be able to deploy SAP Cloud Platform to extend their current business solutions, build new applications and integrate third-party technologies.

“China has been SAP’s second home for more than two decades,” said SAP Chief Executive Officer Bill McDermott. “Alibaba and SAP’s growing partnership expands our ability to empower digital China by building intelligent enterprises. SAP embraces the China Dream as we prepare for substantial expansion here in the years ahead.”

“We are pleased our partnership with SAP reached new heights today,” said Daniel Zhang, Chief Executive Officer, Alibaba Group. “The availability of SAP’s globally renowned ERP system S/4HANA Cloud on Alibaba Cloud is yet another milestone in our globalisation strategy, and exemplary of our mission to make it easy to do business anywhere. We have formed a close collaboration with SAP in the past, and it is exciting for us to expand our partnership.”

“The entrepreneurs who believe and embrace the future; and who can leverage new thinking, new concepts and new technologies will be future winners,” said Jack Ma, Executive Chairman, Alibaba Group.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud brings intelligence to the enterprise with its AI-powered automation and predictive analytics, hands-free conversational UX and next-generation business processes. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, companies can migrate core business processes at a lower cost, experience faster deployment and innovation cycles and see shortened time to value. A growing number of businesses in China are adopting SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

SAP Cloud Platform is an open platform as a service (PaaS) that provides a unique in-memory database and a set of technology and business services for building, extending and connecting enterprise applications. As an open and agile application and integration platform, SAP Cloud Platform enables customers to transform and rapidly develop new applications and cutting-edge technologies as well as personalize and customize existing ones.

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud is China’s largest provider of public cloud services and according to Gartner Inc., the company is also among the world’s top three IaaS providers. The partnership extends the global reach of SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Cloud Platform to all top public clouds.

As part of the agreement, SAP will continue to employ Alibaba Cloud’s technology, and Alibaba will adopt SAP S/4HANA software to drive its own innovation and new business model.

Alibaba and SAP will explore further collaboration in areas around artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, New Retail and New Manufacturing, all of which are new initiatives by Alibaba Group. The collaboration is expected to offer solutions that will drive further development in the area of digital transformation and maximize value to customers.