SAP certifies Amazon Web Services for half of its application portfolio, core ERP on deck
SAP has certified its Rapid Deployment software as well as BusinessObjects for deployment on Amazon Web Services in a move aimed at lowering total cost of ownership and speeding up implementations.
According to SAP, the products certified for AWS on Wednesday cover half of its total portfolio.
The partnership, announced at SAP's Sapphire conference in Orlando, means that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been tested and benchmarked as a hardware layer in deployments. Amazon and SAP executives also said that enterprise resource planning (ERP) software will also be certified at a later date.
SAP and AWS have been long-time partners, but the certification takes things an extra step. With certification, AWS will increasingly become an option for SAP's enterprise customers. Hardware provisioning and deployment is a significant chunk of ERP and business intelligence deployments and typically takes weeks. With AWS, that time can be condensed to hours. Business process retooling and software development and installation are the other key items.
Among the key points:
- SAP and AWS have tested protocols to meet on-premise standards.
- Any certified systems integrators will ultimately be able to deploy SAP applications. Itelligence and CapGemini are two notable integrators on board early with the SAP-AWS partnership.
- Sanjay Poonen, president of global solutions at SAP, said many customers are moving test and development to AWS and increasingly they are moving ERP too. For instance, Lionsgate has its SAP instances on AWS.
- Poonen added that small and mid-sized enterprises using SAP will most likely move to AWS early. However, Adam Selipsky, vice president of Amazon Web Services, said large enterprises are likely to move to AWS too. "A number of customers are ready to do ERP on AWS in production," he said.
- SAP said it expects the AWS to lower the shelfware problem. Many projects are put off because they don't have the time to implement.
- Selipsky said that AWS hasn't seen a sales drop-off due to its outage---he has been checking daily. The outage, however, did bring architecture to the table. Enterprises are now looking at companies such as Netflix, Okta and Smugmug to learn about redundancy techniques.
The big picture here is that SAP is looking to speed up deployment time while lowering cost. Poonen also noted that SAP is moving to certify a bevy of databases---notably Sybase's ASE and IQ. You can also expect that AWS relational database will also be certified. Toss in SAP's HANA in-memory technology and the company is trying to cut out Oracle's core database business in multiple areas.
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- SAP: In-memory to hit all applications; Collaboration, mobility in focus
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- How SAP Aims to Lead the Enterprise Mobile App Market
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- Five Mobile Must-Sees at SAPPHIRE NOW 2011