IBM and SAP partner to accelerate enterprise Cloud adoption

"We look forward to extending one of the longest and most successful partnerships in the IT industry", stated Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. "The demand for SAP HANA and the SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA in the Cloud is tremendous and this global agreement with IBM heralds a new era of Cloud collaboration. We anticipate customers will benefit from this collaboration and expansion of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud."

"This announcement is a significant milestone in the deployment of enterprise Cloud", stated IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty. "It builds on our two companies' long history of bringing innovation to business, and extends IBM's position as the premier global Cloud platform. Our secure, open, hybrid enterprise cloud platform will enable SAP clients to support new ways to work in an era shaped by Big Data, mobile and social."

Together, IBM and SAP have the expertise, solutions and cloud infrastructure to deliver SAP business solutions on the IBM Cloud. SAP brings the power of realtime through in-memory computing capabilities of SAP HANA combined with the ability to run mission-critical business applications, like SAP Business Suite, in a Cloud environment. IBM brings enterprise depth and the open architecture of IBM Cloud Managed Services and SoftLayer - enabling customers to securely manage SAP workloads from trial to production on a consistent infrastructure, with transparency and control over where data resides. In addition, customers will benefit from the technology and services from both companies that offer industry-specific best practices, enabling customers to transform their organisations. SAP and IBM customers of all sizes will benefit from this joint collaboration of two of the most trusted companies in the industry.

Key benefits to enterprises of all sizes are expected to include:

• Customers can take advantage of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with the global footprint of IBM Cloud. This enables customers to put data to work with SAP HANA and business applications in the IBM Cloud built for speed, transparency and control.
• SAP HANA will run on IBM Cloud to provide an open-standards-based approach that will help create the foundation to more easily integrate existing technology investments with new workloads.
• IBM and SAP are committed to security for enterprise customers in the Cloud. The IBM Cloud provides visibility and control to enable enterprises to apply and extend their security best practices into a Cloud environment.
• Companies will now have additional reach and scale to more easily start locally and scale globally with Cloud capabilities and also comply with data residency and other regulatory mandates.