The Rise with SAP and Google Cloud partnership has been extended. Last week IgniteSAP shared SAP’s announcement of strong cloud revenue growth. This week we will focus on SAP and Google Cloud.
Through the new extension of their partnership Google Cloud will now become a strategic partner for the Rise with SAP package. The partnership will augment the acceleration of their customers’ cloud and business process migrations.
Google Cloud will be offering various SAP services and products on their cloud infrastructure. These will include solutions like SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud from the SAP Business Technology Platform.
The partnership focuses on migrating customer data to S/4HANA and is administered by a single service level agreement. The Rise with SAP package allows transformations in a flexible way that allows customers to have more control over the implementation process. SAP customers moving to Google Cloud will also benefit from capabilities such as AI and Machine Learning.
Rob Enslin, president at Google Cloud, said:
“Google Cloud and SAP share a commitment to supporting customer success and growth. We’re delighted to partner with SAP to accelerate business’ digital transformations with SAP on Google Cloud and with next-generation cloud capabilities.
Through support for RISE with SAP and in-depth integrations between SAP and Google Cloud, this new partnership will enable customers to seamlessly bring their most critical business systems and applications to a future-proof, secure and low-latency environment and to run them sustainably, on the industry’s cleanest cloud”
Thomas Saueressig, SAP Executive Board member and SAP’s head of Product Engineering commented:
“RISE with SAP has been enthusiastically adopted by customers who want to accelerate their journey toward becoming an intelligent enterprise. We are now expanding our partnership with Google Cloud to further customer success.
Offering integration between SAP solutions, SAP BTP and Google Cloud infrastructure and capabilities in artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics gives customers the choice they desire as well as the innovative portfolio they seek to transform their businesses in the cloud.”
Since the introduction of Rise with SAP and the initial announcement of SAP’s collaboration with Google Cloud the companies have seen multiple joint customers adopt the Rise with SAP on Google Cloud package.
Energizer Holdings Inc., used Rise with SAP and Google Cloud to help implement SAP S/4HANA for central finance. This helps Energizer to increase efficiency and support product strategy as well as manage future mergers and acquisitions.
MSC Industrial Supply Co. a supplier of operations products and services to the North American industry sector, moved its SAP systems to Google Cloud to facilitate scalability and agility. The use of cloud analytics capabilities helped MSC to get more value from its business data. The migration to S/4HANA Cloud on Google Cloud infrastructure, along with the use of Google Cloud’s BigQuery product significantly reduced the time needed to manage and analyse data.
Aside from Rise, the emphasis on facilitation of migration by these two corporations is benefiting customers substantially. Last year Southwire, a wire and cable manufacturer was able to migrate its SAP environment to Google Cloud over a weekend with only 16 hours of downtime. The Rise with SAP package, combined with Google Cloud infrastructure has increased the potential for a larger group of customers to migrate extremely quickly, and adapt their systems as required.
Google Cloud’s managing director for SAP Snehanshu Shah described the strategic partnership as a “huge opportunity” and a “massive change event” for SAP partners and customers:
“Over the next two years, you’re going to see probably 20,000 to 30,000 (on-premise SAP) customers migrate. Each one of them needs a partner to help out. That’s just SI partners. On the other side of the equation, when you migrate to public cloud, you also have opportunities for ISV partners and channel partners.”
The strategy behind the partnership is to simultaneously improve products and services and make implementation easier for customers. The Rise with SAP package is a key driver toward S/4HANA adoption and in turn S/4HANA drives SAP customers to adopt other SAP products and services. SAP believes that this snowball effect will vastly increase their market share in ERP and the cloud Software-as-a-Service market.
The cross-selling aspect of the partnership is also a huge motivation for both parties as well as their customers. There is stability and compatibility implied in the offer of joint products and services. With the shift from monolithic ERP implementations and upgrades to a practice of constantly tuning up existing systems, ease of integration and extension will be essential.
In another statement about the partnership Snehanshu Shah pointed out that: “Google Cloud capabilities with Live Migration ensure that a customer’s SAP applications remain up and running during infrastructure updates, enabling SAP and Google Cloud to perform maintenance without interruption.”
Chance Veasey, senior vice president of application product management for Navisite, a cloud services provider which is a partner of both companies said:
“This partnership will enable customers to speed transformation with SAP on GCP and really positions Google to take full advantage of a large SAP customer ecosystem that wants to accelerate to the cloud. Google Cloud infrastructure, combined with Google’s enterprise focus and recent advancements in the areas of SAP integrations, analytics and application modernisation, make Google Cloud an attractive choice for SAP customers. Google Cloud’s investment in the SAP market is meaningful, especially in the mid-market where organisations are looking to rapidly innovate so that they can outpace their competition.”
From the perspective of SAP focussed IT Consultants and SAP professionals the flexibility of the Rise with SAP package combined with Google Cloud scalability provides a means to make implementation projects less daunting for their own customers. It does not reduce the need of those migrating to the cloud for advisors and implementors.
Though there is a pre-packaged combination of software and services, the ability to tailor and extend Rise with SAP to a specific business context means that industries will require specialists to get the most out of their investment. Over the next five years there will be a dramatic increase in the number of businesses going through digital transformations and moving their business processes to the cloud as support for legacy systems is reduced. In the longer term the benefits of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service, such as scalability and constant adaptation, will need the input of IT consultants on a less extensive but much more frequent basis.
At the SAP Global Partner Summit David Lowson of Capgemini said that he believed SAP needed to launch the Rise with SAP initiative to remain relative for digital transformation, and in a recent interview with Philippe Schmitt of SAP Strategic Global Alliances said that:
“By focusing on innovation and differentiation taking place in the SAP Business Technology Platform surrounding it, the RISE initiative is a clear statement of the importance of providing accelerated business outcomes with integration, data to value, and extensibility. It opens the door to exciting new consumption models.”
Independent and sub-contracted Systems Integrators will also see an increase in opportunities to provide services for small to medium-sized companies.
The strategic alliances with cloud service providers and hyper-scalers that SAP has made during the last six months and preceding the release of the Rise with SAP program have given the end-users of SAP products the maximum amount of choice while still nudging them in the inevitable direction of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service.
In October of last year Gartner said that by 2024 “more than 45% of IT spend… will shift from traditional solutions to the cloud.”
Following the same reasoning SAP fully intends to put all of its efforts into being at the forefront of the cloud shift and consequently, although they have been keen to form alliances with many players, it is clear that Google Cloud will be one of their most crucial strategic partners.
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If you would like to reach out for advice on how to prepare yourself, and position yourself as an IT professional to make a great career from the cloud shift please do not hesitate to contact us.
