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Microsoft touts progress on bringing SAP to Azure

Microsoft and SAP are moving ahead in bringing SAP's various software and services to Azure, as well as on Microsoft's own internal SAP 4/HANA implementation.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

Microsoft and SAP are moving forward in their partnership around making more SAP software and services available on Azure.

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Credit: ZDNet

On June 5, Microsoft provided a progress report, noting that the SAP Cloud Platform is now generally available on Azure.

"Developers can now deploy Cloud Foundry based SAP Cloud Platform on Azure in the West Europe region. We're working with SAP to enable more regions in the months ahead," according to Microsoft's blog post.

Microsoft officials also said the largest SAP HANA-optimized VM size in the cloud would be available "soon." The Azure M-series -- based on Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake) processors -- will support large memory virtual machines with sizes up to 12 TB, officials said.

Microsoft and SAP have been working to get SAP's business software and services running on Azure since at least 2011. In 2014, Microsoft and SAP announced a number of SAP's core business applications would be certified on Azure, the way they had been on Amazon's public cloud since 2011.

Last November, Microsoft and SAP committed to deploy each other's cloud offerings internally, as well as to jointly engineer and support resulting integrated Microsoft and SAP business services.

On June 5, SAP officials said that in 2017 they "started to leverage Azure as IaaS (infrastrucure as a service) Platform." SAP expects by the end of 2018 to have moved 17 systems, including an S/4HANA system for its Concur Business Unit, to Azure.

Microsoft, for its part, said it began in 2017 its internal migration of its SAP system to S/4HANA. As of February, Microsoft had moved its SAP environment completely onto Azure, and since has stood up multiple sandbox environments of S/4HANA, officials said.

At its Sapphire Now conference this week, SAP officials introduced SAP C/4HANA, a new CRM offering, which incorporates the acquisitions of Hybris, Gigya and Callidus Cloud to cover consumer data, marketing, commerce, sales and customer services.

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