SAP and Microsoft grow partnership into cloud and BI

The pair has just announced a tranche of new connections between them, including not only BI but also mobile applications and the certification of applications to run on Azure   

SAP is still finding its feet when it comes to delivering services in the cloud, and as part of that process it is extending its partnership with Microsoft to provide certification for business-critical applications to run on the Microsoft Azure platform.

In particular this will include improved interoperability between data from SAP applications and Microsoft Office, and general availability of connectivity between SAP’s BusinessObjects business intelligence solutions and Microsoft’s Power BI offering. There will also be greater mobile productivity with expanded development and support for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1.

It is anticipated that by the end of Q2 2014, Microsoft and SAP will support SAP Business Suite software, SAP Business All-In-One solutions, SAP Mobile Platform, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE) and the developer edition of the SAP HANA platform on Azure.

In addition, Microsoft and SAP expect that customers and developers will be able to deploy and provision a number of preconfigured SAP solutions, within minutes, directly to Azure using the SAP Cloud Appliance Library tool. 

New and existing SAP customers will be able to take advantage of the “pay per use” model in Azure to reduce infrastructure costs and total cost of ownership. Customers will be able to take advantage of the compute resources in Azure to support SAP solutions and quickly scale capacity as computing requirements change, paying only for the resources used.

The pair have engineered connectivity between Microsoft’s Excel and SAP’s BusinessObjects BI solutions through Microsoft’s Power BI offering. They have also announced plans to deepen interoperability between applications and platforms with a new version of the SAP Gateway for Microsoft, which is expected to help customers automate business processes and access SAP applications and data through Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure.

Customers can get started today with the current SAP Gateway for Microsoft and upgrade to the new version when it becomes available in the second half of 2014.

There is also a plan for the pair to help customers conduct business anywhere and anytime by developing and co-marketing SAP mobile apps for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1. These new applications will be managed and secured by the SAP Mobile Secure portfolio or Windows Intune. 

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