Microsoft + SAP help bring retail and CG businesses to the cloud
This week at ASUG, the annual SAP conference known as SAPPHIRE NOW, we are seeing a step change in SAP’s strategy in transformation to the cloud. In fact, “cloud” is the overwhelming message at this year’s event as every major SAP workload has now been cloud-enabled as they prepare for the near future.
Last year, Microsoft announced a new era of partnership with SAP, enabling SAP HANA on Microsoft Azure. Since then, we’ve worked hard and invested deeply to ensure that Azure remains the best public cloud option for SAP customers, setting the highest bar for scale, performance, innovation, compliance and intelligent services—all with the goal of helping enterprise customers drive their digital transformation.
Just 12 months ago, though, it was still hard to imagine that we could seriously consider this option for our retail and consumer goods customers, given the size environments needed to run their businesses in the cloud.
The good news is that SAP in the cloud is now officially on the table for even the largest retail and consumer goods brands with Azure.
This week at SAPPHIRE, Microsoft announced several new enhancements, extending enterprise-scale support for SAP HANA and reinforcing our commitment to offer unlimited headroom for business growth and innovation. Here are a few highlights.
- Enabling larger landscapes of SAP HANA, including S/4HANA, across both virtual machines and Large Instance offerings.
- M-Series Virtual Machines (VMs) offering up to 3.5TB RAM per node – allowing customers to avail the agility, cost and management benefits of Azure VMs. We expect these to be some of the most powerful VMs offered in the public cloud.
- New SAP HANA Large Instance sizes offering up to 20TB RAM per node for customers requiring larger landscapes that exceed the limits of today’s hypervisors. With this, our HANA large instances can support memory configurations all the way from 768 GB to 20TB.
- Scale-out SAP HANA environments of up to 60TB for SAP BW/4HANA, BW and S/4HANA scenarios and customers with the most demanding workloads.
With these new features and more, both retailers and consumer goods brands—with massive amounts of daily transactions and supply chain and manufacturing interoperability needs—can run their most demanding and mission-critical SAP HANA workloads on Azure in the cloud.
To learn more, here are a few resources for you.
- Visit our SAP HANA on Azure page
- Read what one of SAP’s largest partners thinks about these announcements.
- Hear from early adopters Coats and Mosaic who decided on Azure as their cloud platform for SAP solution landscapes.
Coats: The world’s leading industrial thread manufacturer, and the first organization in the world to run its production SAP HANA software in Azure, has been able to speed up planning cycles and accelerate delivery of finished goods to their customers. You can also watch their story below.
Mosaic: One of the world’s largest producers of phosphate and potash crop nutrients moved all its global financial, commercial, and supply-chain SAP systems to Azure, increasing speed and agility. The company anticipates a year over year cost savings of 20 percent.
And if you didn’t attend SAPPHIRE, you can still see the keynotes and partner resources and follow the conversation on @Azure. We look forward to helping you get started!
LinkedIn: Colin Wright
