A lit­tle more than two years ago, SAP and Google Cloud announced a part­ner­ship that would allow cus­tomers to eas­i­ly inte­grate Google’s cloud and machine learn­ing solu­tions with SAP enter­prise appli­ca­tions. The result of that part­ner­ship was announced at this year’s Google Next con­fer­ence in San Fran­cis­co. Atten­dees learned that they can now run SAP sys­tems native­ly on Google Cloud Plat­form (GCP).

Google CEO Sun­dar Pichai told a room full of devel­op­ers, busi­ness users, and IT pro­fes­sion­als that Anthos, a mul­ti- and hybrid-cloud offer­ing, is now gen­er­al­ly avail­able. Not only does Anthos allow SAP cus­tomers to deploy Google Cloud in their own data cen­ters, but it also gives them the flex­i­bil­i­ty to build, run, and man­age work­loads on GCP or oth­er cloud providers with­out mak­ing any changes. ​“You can write once and run any­where,” he said.

We caught up with Kevin Ichh­pu­rani, cor­po­rate vice pres­i­dent at Google, to find out what Anthos and the over­all part­ner­ship between SAP and Google Cloud means for ASUG Mem­bers.

Sharon: Can you talk about the strate­gic part­ner­ship between GCP and SAP? Why should SAP cus­tomers choose Google Cloud?

Kevin: The part­ner­ship allows SAP cus­tomers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to use GCP to accel­er­ate their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. We’ve infused SAP DNA through­out every­thing we’re doing by bring­ing in tal­ent from SAP, as well as embed­ding tal­ent from Google Cloud at the SAP head­quar­ters in Wall­dorf, Ger­many. We have a ded­i­cat­ed focus from a prod­uct strat­e­gy and from an engi­neer­ing per­spec­tive, as well as ded­i­cat­ed solu­tions spe­cial­ists who can advise clients on what is their ​“to be” state, which will help them under­stand how to get to the cloud.

As for why GCP, we see that a lot of the largest SAP cus­tomers in the world—McKesson for exam­ple — are start­ing to choose Google. The entire SAP port­fo­lio that runs on-prem also runs on the GCP.

To start, GCP offers the strongest secu­ri­ty. We have built every part of the infra­struc­ture stack, which is tam­per resis­tant. The sec­ond rea­son is that GCP has the best uptime in the indus­try. The third thing is that cus­tomers can run SAP envi­ron­ments native­ly in GCP. And the fourth rea­son is innovation.

Not only does SAP Leonar­do run on GCP, but our machine learn­ing ser­vices are avail­able with­in SAP Leonar­do. Cus­tomers have the option if they’re using SAP Leonar­do to not only run it on our cloud, but to actu­al­ly have SAP Leonar­do Google APIs exposed. You get the best of both worlds. That’s where this is real­ly start­ing to get excit­ing and why a lot of cus­tomers are choos­ing us.

Sharon: What are the key dri­vers and ben­e­fits SAP cus­tomers are get­ting from the part­ner­ship with Google Cloud?

Kevin: First, cus­tomers can run SAP in the cloud in the most secure, most reli­able, and tru­ly native cloud envi­ron­ment. And then addi­tion­al­ly, they can inno­vate on top of the core with machine learn­ing and Google Analytics.

Anoth­er ben­e­fit is that cus­tomers can have glob­al scale in SAP envi­ron­ments. Google has the largest and most com­pre­hen­sive net­work in the world. This mat­ters because when you have cus­tomers going from sev­er­al SAP ECC instances to a sin­gle instance of SAP S/4HANA, the biggest chal­lenge becomes dri­ving net­work per­for­mance. With our net­work, cus­tomers can actu­al­ly get the per­for­mance results they need when doing an SAP S/4HANA consolidation.

And final­ly, SAP and GCP also have a col­lab­o­ra­tive per­for­mance sup­port process. If a cus­tomer is hav­ing a per­for­mance issue and doesn’t know if it’s in the appli­ca­tion tier or in the infra­struc­ture tier, both SAP and GCP work togeth­er to triage the sit­u­a­tion. We are work­ing togeth­er on an engi­neer­ing lev­el to tru­ly co-inno­vate and opti­mize our cloud for SAP soft­ware. It’s this deep sup­port and co-inno­va­tion rela­tion­ship that is so rev­o­lu­tion­ary and is a ben­e­fit for customers.

Sharon: Accord­ing to ASUG research, only one third of the par­tic­i­pants in our recent cloud study were some­what con­fi­dent in their cloud providers. What would you say to address their con­cerns, espe­cial­ly about security?

Kevin: As I men­tioned ear­li­er, GCP offers best-in-class secu­ri­ty. There is a rea­son why some of the largest cus­tomers are choos­ing us, includ­ing some of the largest finan­cial insti­tu­tions in the world. Secu­ri­ty is one of our biggest differentiators.

Sharon: How does Google Cloud work with SAP cus­tomers to right-size their workloads?

Kevin: Cus­tomers can now run their SAP envi­ron­ments native­ly on GCP, so there is no need to right-size their work­loads. This is anoth­er dif­fer­en­tia­tor for us. Cus­tomers don’t need to wor­ry about run­ning on bare met­al. They don’t need to think about siz­ing for a three-year com­mit­ment and then being forced to make a cost­ly upgrade in the future if they get it wrong.

On GCP, they’re run­ning on vir­tu­al machines (VMs). When they go live and real­ize they have too much or too lit­tle, they can scale up or down with­out any restric­tions or upcharges. For exam­ple, if a retail­er needs to scale up dur­ing the busy sell­ing sea­son and then scale back down in Jan­u­ary, they will have that flex­i­bil­i­ty with GCP.

Sharon: What are the top cloud myths you’d like to dispel?

Kevin: The first one is about secu­ri­ty. I think a few years ago the fear was that the cloud is not secure. But that’s not the case any­more and I’d argue that more cus­tomers are now mov­ing to the cloud because they real­ize that it offers more secu­ri­ty then they can ever main­tain themselves.

The oth­er myth is that the only rea­son to move to the cloud is for reduc­tion in your total cost of own­er­ship (TCO). We see more cus­tomers mov­ing to the cloud now to begin to dri­ve busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion. They are also think­ing about how to cre­ate com­plete­ly new busi­ness mod­els, as well as how to achieve sim­plic­i­ty and glob­al scale. It’s not just about TCO and cost reduction.

Sharon: What’s next for the part­ner­ship between SAP and Google Cloud?

Kevin: There is a lot more news com­ing this year. We’ll talk about some of it at SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence. We have a very aggres­sive road map for run­ning the largest envi­ron­ments in the world, native­ly on the cloud. So stay tuned.

Reg­is­ter today for SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence and save your spot for an ​“Overview of SAP Leonar­do.” If you’re plan­ning to attend a day ear­li­er (Mon­day, May 6), reg­is­ter for ASUG Pre-Con­fer­ence Sem­i­nar, ​“SAP Leonar­do: Busi­ness Process Inno­va­tions for the Intel­li­gent Enterprise.”