IBM and SAP, two veterans of the tech space, have expanded their partnership with one another in a bid to accelerate cloud adoption.
As part of the agreement, IBM is now a premium supplier for the “Rise with SAP” collection of subscription-based software and services.
The company has also revealed its “Breakthrough with IBM for Rise with SAP” portfolio of consulting services designed to help customers transition to SAP S/4Hana Cloud.
While key competitors such as AWS, Microsoft, and Google have come to dominate the public cloud space, the latest move from IBM solidifies its focus on hybrid cloud. For now at least, helping customers benefit from on-premises and cloud environments seems to be the company’s market niche.
Such a niche appeals to customers from highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications where specialised clouds are necessary.
SAP launched Rise with SAP in January 2021 to help customers migrate to S/4Hana before the 2027 end-of-life date that looms over the on-premises SAP ERP comes to fruition.
Over the course of last year, the software giant partnered with Google Cloud and Deloitte to support and refine this migration.
The results have been a major success. In the last quarter, SAP recorded a 28% increase in revenue whilst IBM a more modest 6.5%, still the company’s best figures in a decade.
In an interview with CRN, SAP Cloud president Brian Duffy commented on the reasoning behind the partnership: “It‘s rare that you have in the tech industry where there are powerhouses like SAP and IBM coming together in order to serve our customers, but that genuinely is what we’re doing here.
“We‘re choosing to say, ‘We’re not going to be the infrastructure provider, because there‘s others who are really good at doing that – an IBM or other hyperscaler – we’re going to leverage them.”
He continued: “We‘re not in a scenario where we’re competing with each other. And I think the evolution and the transformation that we‘re going through as a company is now we have to work hand in glove with an IBM as opposed to, potentially competing with them, which is a great evolution of the partnership, and one which I think is really going to help our customers as well.”
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