Microsoft-oriented SAP customers will have the choice of running some of their apps on the Azure cloud platform, following the announcement that the two vendors are establishing a new partnership.
Microsoft corporate vice president of cloud and enterprise marketing Takeshi Numoto announced the partnership on his TechNet blog, and pointed out that 86 per cent of Fortune 500 companies run SAP software.
Today's announcement means that by the end of June this year, a developer edition of the HANA in-memory database will be available on Azure, along with the Business Suite, All-in-One and Mobile Platform products.
Numoto also announced the general availability of Microsoft Power Business Intelligence connectivity to SAP BusinessObjects BI, delivered in Excel for data access and analysis via the Power Query functionality in the spreadsheet program.
Mobility updates for industry-specific SAP retail and banking apps and new versions of the German software company's Mobile Platform were also promised to appear in 2015, with previews before that, Numoto said.
Despite a long-running partnership on traditional server platforms, Microsoft has lagged in luring SAP into its Azure cloud.
SAP has certified many of its business apps on Microsoft cloud competitor Amazon Web Services since 2011, including HANA One and On-Demand up to 1.22 terabytes in size, Business Suite, All-in-One, BusinessObjects and others.
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