SAP and Microsoft broaden cloud ERP alliance
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SAP expanded its partnership with Microsoft to help drive enterprise adoption of the ERP provider's Business Suite bundles for finance, supply chain, human resources, procurement and customer experience functions, the two companies said Tuesday.
The joint migration acceleration initiative complements extensive platform integration plans unveiled along with the Business Suite offerings last week during SAP's annual Sapphire conference.
The integrations announced May 20 connect SAP's Joule AI assistant with the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity tools, including Copilot, Teams, Outlook and Word. Microsoft also extended its Sentra, Defender and Entra security tools across SAP's cloud ERP and aims to launch SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Databricks on Azure analytics services later this year.
SAP is counting on technology partners to guide customers to its S/4HANA cloud-based ERP as the company prepares to terminate mainstream support for on-premises ERP Central Component deployments in 2027.
'By combining forces, we provide partners with proven frameworks, shared resources, and scalable tools that address complex challenges,' Karl Fahrbach, chief partner officer of SAP, said in the Tuesday announcement.
The bundled offerings are designed to ease migrations by targeting function-specific business processes with traditional ERP capabilities in combination with data pipeline, analytics and AI services.
While Microsoft is the first hyperscaler to offer the Business Suite Accelerator program, SAP recently expanded existing pacts with AWS and Google Cloud to ease the flow of ERP data across clouds.
AWS and SAP launched a generative AI development initiative to help Accenture, Deloitte and other ecosystem partners build agentic tools using ERP data and the hyperscaler's Bedrock platform, the companies announced on May 20. Initial use cases include identifying financial anomalies in real time and mitigating supply chain disruptions, according to SAP CTO and Chief AI Officer Philipp Herzig.
In addition to integrating the Databricks-powered Business Data Cloud on Azure, SAP connected the data pipeline to Google Cloud's BigQuery data warehouse to bring together data stored in ERP and third-party repositories. SAP Business Data Cloud will be deployed in three Google Cloud regions in later this year, according to a May 20 announcement.
SAP was among the first cadre of providers to sign on to Google Cloud's Agent2Agent open protocol for multi-agent AI orchestration in April. The two companies gave SAP customers access to Google's Gemini family of large language models through SAP Business Technology Platform's generative AI hub and opened SAP data to the hyperscaler's Agentspace tool-building platform earlier this month.
'Our objective is to enable all enterprises to streamline data integration and data science, enhance their analytical workflows, and accelerate their transformation into an AI-driven enterprise,' the companies said in the announcement.
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