American multinational technology corporation Microsoft has recently decided to deploy RISE with SAP on Microsoft Cloud. The move will help migrate the company’s SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition — the German tech giant’s complete ERP system with built-in intelligent technologies.
In terms of co-innovation and development, SAP and Microsoft have a well-established and long-standing partnership that serves as a foundation for the mutual support of both organisations’ product lines today. Because of their strong track record of working together, the companies have already created a reliable cloud data centre for SAP workloads that aims to increase infrastructure value while also providing joint customer support that ensures teams are aligned to address client issues. Besides teaming up hand in hand to integrate their respective portfolios to help organisations simplify digital transformation and business innovation, the tech behemoths are also each other’s customers.
As an SAP customer, Microsoft’s human resources (HR) department reached a milestone with the complete implementation of SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central across its operations in 109 countries last year. Furthermore, SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite was chosen as the platform for the company’s transition to the cloud from its on-premises SAP ERP Human Capital Management (HCM) system. In addition to meeting the business’ need for a cloud platform that could fulfill its mobile-first, cloud-first strategy, the HXM Suite also served as a basis for future digital transformation initiatives.
This month, Microsoft announced its adoption of SAP’s Business Transformation as a Service (BTaaS) offering RISE with SAP across its internal operations to modernise several of its large SAP ERP deployments, making it the first public cloud provider to do so. This announcement coincides with the first anniversary of Microsoft’s strategic agreement with SAP, which enabled the firm to offer the Microsoft Cloud platform as one of the infrastructure hosting choices for the RISE with SAP service. With this significant move, Microsoft will be able to expedite its own SAP S/4HANA transformation while also gaining additional expertise and best practices in order to better support its clients.
Charlotte Yarkoni, President of Commerce and Ecosystems (C+E) at Microsoft, said in a statement:
“Our goal is to simplify and accelerate our own journey to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Modernising highly complex, legacy SAP systems is directly relevant to us at Microsoft and to many of our customers. Leveraging the power of the RISE with SAP solution on Azure will give us the flexibility and agility needed to scale quickly, meet the needs of our own business and share that experience with our customers.”
Deploying RISE with SAP on Microsoft Cloud
Microsoft’s decision to use RISE with SAP is a continuation of the company’s extensive use of SAP products such as SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), and other SAP applications deployed in the Azure platform. Leveraging the German software giant’s signature cloud offering, Microsoft intends to improve its knowledge of SAP solutions and develop best practices that may be shared for the benefit of both SAP and Microsoft’s customers.
Florian Roth, Chief Digital and Information Officer at SAP, shared:
“Microsoft’s move to RISE with SAP is a testament to the commitment and strength of SAP and Microsoft’s ongoing partnership to simplify customers’ journey to the cloud by accelerating adoption of SAP S/4HANA Cloud on Microsoft Azure.”
On the other hand, SAP has also moved a number of its mission-critical IT infrastructure to Microsoft Azure, describing it as a scalable and adaptable cloud computing platform. Under the agreement, SAP will optimise IT processes for key internal business systems as part of its own transformational journey and in order to gain productivity improvements. Additionally, SAP will also employ the same operations model as the RISE with SAP solution, which is hosted on Microsoft Azure, to accomplish this.
“Likewise, SAP has optimised its critical internal business systems running on Microsoft Azure to benefit from its security, flexibility, and scalability. We will be sure to use the learnings from these deployments and share best practices with our customers,” Roth added.
