SAP announced a new set of part­ner­ships at SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence intro­duced as project ​“Embrace.” This is a strate­gic col­lab­o­ra­tion with Microsoft Azure, Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS), and Google Cloud Plat­form (GCP), as well a num­ber of oth­er glob­al strate­gic ser­vice part­ners (GSSPs).

The pro­gram itself is designed to help ASUG mem­bers and oth­er SAP cus­tomers move to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud, but with­in the con­text of their exist­ing tech­nol­o­gy stacks and IT environments.

Howdy, Cloud Partner

It’s impor­tant to step back and remem­ber why tech­nol­o­gy firms form part­ner­ships in the first place. In the case of SAP S/4HANA — which is rarely the low­est-cost piece of tech­nol­o­gy in any organization’s total soft­ware real estate — SAP knows that cus­tomers will often use oth­er ven­dors’ tech­nolo­gies to per­form cer­tain func­tions at a low­er cost. 

Being able to inte­grate with a competitor’s IT envi­ron­ment is key, whether those IT ven­dors are indus­try giants or small­er play­ers who may even­tu­al­ly appear on the acqui­si­tion radar.

Of course, there are oth­er rea­sons for tech part­ner­ships such as plug­ging gaps in road maps, joint devel­op­ment ini­tia­tives, and more com­mer­cial­ly dri­ven reseller ambi­tions. But what are the spe­cif­ic mechan­ics inside SAP’s project Embrace?

SAP explains it as, ​“A means of putting a customer’s move to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud in the lan­guage and con­text of their pri­ma­ry indus­try, by rec­om­mend­ing the plat­form, soft­ware, ser­vices, and infra­struc­ture from SAP as well as their pre­ferred hyper­scaler and pre­ferred ser­vice partner.”

Indus­try Lan­guage and Context

This is a dri­ve to help cus­tomers move to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud in the lan­guage of their choice. Not mean­ing a pro­gram­ming lan­guage such as Java, SQL, C++, Python, etc., but rather, the busi­ness-tech­ni­cal lan­guage that is suc­cess­ful­ly car­ry­ing projects through in any giv­en indus­try vertical.

Indeed, that is SAP’s next point — con­text. This project aims to pro­vide cus­tomers with a cloud migra­tion guide designed for a spe­cif­ic indus­try. It is putting in con­text the types of appli­ca­tions and ser­vices that a typ­i­cal firm in that indus­try is using to meet their needs.

In terms of lan­guage and con­text, SAP has said that project Embrace will include ref­er­ence archi­tec­tures that serve as a tech­ni­cal blue­print. These archi­tec­tures have been joint­ly devel­oped with the three key cloud part­ners in the part­ner­ship and they include all the com­po­nent infor­ma­tion required to run the customer’s appli­ca­tions. There are also what are being called ​“mar­ket-approved jour­neys,” which along­side the tech­ni­cal ref­er­ence archi­tec­tures, can act as a mar­ket-test­ed road map to SAP S/4HANA by industry.

Your Plat­form, Soft­ware Ser­vices, and Hyper­scaler of Choice

SAP is ready to work across all plat­forms, whether it’s between dif­fer­ent com­put­er oper­at­ing sys­tems, dif­fer­ent form fac­tors such as desk­top and mobile, or dif­fer­ent core instances of on-premise, hybrid, and pub­lic cloud computing.

Addi­tion­al­ly, there will be inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty between whichev­er soft­ware and ser­vices are deployed across those plat­forms, all aligned to a customer’s pre­ferred hyperscaler.

Hyper­scale Demystified

To round out this break­down, let’s just remind our­selves what a hyper­scaler is in the con­text of hyper­scale com­put­ing and ask why SAP would also con­sid­er this aspect of a customer’s IT topography.

As many of you already know, hyper­scaler (often just writ­ten as hyper­scale) tech­nol­o­gy is an approach that cre­ates an essen­tial­ly dis­trib­uted IT infra­struc­ture back­bone. Because it is dis­trib­uted into more com­po­nen­tized blocks, a hyper­scale approach can allow you to more flu­id­ly pro­vi­sion and bring to life adapt­able IT resources (for exam­ple, com­pute for pro­cess­ing, mem­o­ry, and stor­age for data cap­ture, plus net­work­ing for inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty). You can apply this approach to any giv­en node of IT that exists in a data cen­ter, and adjust it quick­ly based on any chang­ing require­ments with lit­tle to no impact. 

Hyper­scale tech­nol­o­gy is part of the core fab­ric com­po­nent of SAP’s three cloud part­ners who are part of project Embrace. It is also a key focus for a good num­ber of oth­er cloud-scale ven­dors rang­ing from HPE to Nutanix, to Dell EMC, to Cis­co and others.

Read­ing Between the Lines

What SAP has worked toward with Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and oth­ers is choice, inter­op­er­abil­i­ty, infor­ma­tion exchange, and col­lab­o­ra­tion for con­nec­tiv­i­ty. It also appears as an effort to fos­ter a greater degree of pro­fes­sion­al indus­try friend­ship. SAP notes that intend­ed cus­tomer ben­e­fits include short­er nego­ti­a­tions, stream­lined team­ing, and faster, risk-man­aged implementations.

“Our cus­tomers are very clear about the busi­ness out­comes they expect to achieve when migrat­ing to the cloud — and that includes oper­a­tional excel­lence and inno­va­tion,” said Jen­nifer Mor­gan, pres­i­dent of the cloud busi­ness group and mem­ber of the exec­u­tive board of SAP SE. ​“Work­ing togeth­er with the hyper­scalers and glob­al strate­gic ser­vice part­ners, we’re in a unique posi­tion to shape our cus­tomers’ jour­neys to becom­ing intel­li­gent enter­pris­es.”

Part­ner­ing with Microsoft Azure

Microsoft has used its offi­cial cor­po­rate blog to explain that it has been work­ing with SAP on project Embrace for more than a year. The two are work­ing to deliv­er a joint road map with spe­cif­ic inte­grat­ed ref­er­ence archi­tec­ture to run SAP S4/HANA on Microsoft Azure. 

“Work­ing hand-in-hand with SAP to make project Embrace a suc­cess, Microsoft is devel­op­ing an inte­grat­ed, end-to-end process across prod­uct engi­neer­ing, sales, mar­ket­ing, and sup­port teams,” wrote Gavriel­la Schus­ter, cor­po­rate vice pres­i­dent, one com­mer­cial part­ner, Microsoft. ​“As part of this effort, Microsoft and SAP are also align­ing their joint Part­ner Ecosys­tem, as well as col­lab­o­rat­ing close­ly with the SAP Max Atten­tion team to pro­vide a more seam­less cus­tomer sup­port experience.”

Part­ner­ing with Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS)

AWS announced it’s a proud par­tic­i­pant in the pro­gram, which will sim­pli­fy the move to SAP S/4HANA and accel­er­ate an organization’s abil­i­ty to inno­vate like a start­up with­in a spe­cif­ic industry.

“SAP’s Intel­li­gent Enter­prise port­fo­lio and AWS Cloud ser­vices, with co-inno­vat­ed automa­tion, are enabling enter­pris­es around the globe to quick­ly trans­form them­selves to become ​‘start­up-like’: using intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies native­ly, inno­vat­ing busi­ness mod­els faster, serv­ing their cus­tomers glob­al­ly by default, and run­ning at the low­est-cost,” wrote Bas Kam­phuis, gen­er­al man­ag­er, strate­gic ISVs at AWS. ​“Togeth­er, SAP and AWS are build­ing a set of unique offer­ings aimed at retir­ing the tech­ni­cal debt that exists in today’s IT land­scapes and at accel­er­at­ing inno­va­tion by pro­vid­ing instant and on-demand access to high­er-lev­el ser­vices like machine learn­ing, data lakes, and IoT.”

Part­ner­ing with Google Cloud Platform

GCP announced that since part­ner­ing with SAP two years ago, it’s expand­ing its sup­port for SAP cus­tomers. This includes pro­vid­ing glob­al vir­tu­al­ized com­pute infra­struc­ture with 6 and 12 TB instances for SAP HANA work­loads, to part­ner­ships with solu­tions providers, to now engi­neer­ing Google Cloud to be the best place to run SAP workloads. 

“Every enter­prise cus­tomer is dif­fer­ent, which can mean each has their own unique jour­ney to the cloud when it comes to migrat­ing SAP appli­ca­tions,” wrote Sne­han­shu Shah, man­ag­ing direc­tor for SAP, Google Cloud. ​“As part of SAP’s project Embrace, we’ve teamed up to sim­pli­fy this jour­ney by offer­ing cus­tomers mar­ket-approved jour­neys that define indus­try-spe­cif­ic best prac­tices tied to ref­er­ence archi­tec­tures under­pinned by SAP Cloud Plat­form and GCP ser­vices that guide them through their trans­for­ma­tion to SAP S/4HANA. These solu­tions will help cus­tomers mod­ern­ize and cre­ate expe­ri­ences using 100% VM-based, high­ly secure, and high­ly avail­able Google Cloud infra­struc­ture, as well as the lat­est advances in the areas of big data, ana­lyt­ics, and machine learning.”

Shar­ing Strat­e­gy in the Hyper­scaler Huddle

In addi­tion to the ref­er­ence archi­tec­tures and mar­ket-approved road map ele­ments of project Embrace, SAP also notes the initiative’s ​“Solu­tion” block. This is a set of foun­da­tion­al ser­vices run­ning on SAP Cloud Plat­form to sup­port the inte­gra­tion, orches­tra­tion, and exten­sion of SAP sys­tems and third-par­ty appli­ca­tions run­ning in the cloud or on-premise.

A fourth com­po­nent also includes the expand­ed SAP Max­At­ten­tion and SAP ActiveAt­ten­tion ser­vices. These are designed to sup­port cus­tomers run­ning a cloud or hybrid infra­struc­ture on a hyperscaler.

Part­ner­ship clear­ly mat­ters to SAP on many lev­els, espe­cial­ly where they are in the best inter­ests of SAP cus­tomers. This is just one exam­ple of an intri­cate, com­plex, and wide-rang­ing set of engi­neer­ing agree­ments designed to put ASUG mem­bers in the best pos­si­ble posi­tion for their cloud migrations.

Are you ready to make the move to SAP S/4HANA? ASUG mem­bers can watch a ​“How to Build a Busi­ness Case and Road Map to Jus­ti­fy Your Trans­for­ma­tion to SAP S/4HANA” web­cast, avail­able on demand.