Google Cloud's embrace of SAP highlights enterprise ambitions

Google Cloud and SAP are teaming up under an effort called Embrace to offer joint customers more best practices and reference architectures to migrate workloads as well as extensions for C/4HANA. For Google Cloud, closer SAP ties may help it win more enterprise customers.
SAP and Google Cloud have been firming up a partnership in a bid for enterprise customers. SAP initially worked with Amazon Web Services, but is also strong partners with Microsoft Azure as well as Google Cloud. That latter relationship is developing.
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Now under a program called Embrace, SAP said that it will collaborate more closely with Azure, AWS and Google Cloud as strategic partners. These cloud partners will recommend platforms, services, software and infrastructure for SAP applications such as S/4HANA.
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For Google, the SAP partnerships highlights how it is going hard after enterprise customers. Under Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud Platform has added a bevy of executives from big enterprise vendors. A recent hire is Hamidou Dia as Google Cloud's vice president of solutions engineering. Hamidou was most recently Oracle's chief of sales consulting, consulting, enterprise architecture and customer success.
Google Cloud also named John Jester vice president of customer experience. Jester will lead a services team focused on architecture and best practices. Jester was most recently corporate vice president of worldwide customer success at Microsoft.
The additions of Dia and Jester come as Rob Enslin joined Google Cloud as president of global customer operations. Enslin was formerly at SAP.
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As for the SAP partnership, Google Cloud Platform had a presence at SAP Sapphire and outlined the following:
Best practices and reference architecture for moving S/4HANA to Google Cloud. The companies are offering "journeys" or best practices to meld SAP Cloud Platform and Google Cloud services.
SAP C/4HANA extensions on Google Cloud. These extensions allow developers to combine C/4HANA and Google Cloud services natively. There's also a Kubernetes service for deployment and management of C/4 extensions.
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud as a managed service on Google Cloud. The managed service will allow SAP customers to utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics with compute infrastructure managed in the background.