Amazon and SAP Team to Deliver Enterprise Apps in the Cloud

Under a new agreement, Amazon Web Services and SAP have partnered to certify that a suite of SAP's core enterprise solutions will run in production on the AWS cloud.

Amazon Web Services and SAP AG have partnered to deliver SAP's enterprise solutions in the cloud.

Under the agreement, announced at SAP's SAPPHIRE NOW, being held in Orlando, Fla., May 15-18, AWS and SAP have teamed to certify that a suite of SAP's enterprise software-other than the ERP suite-will run in production on the AWS cloud.

The companies announced that a variety of SAP solutions, including SAP Rapid Deployment solutions and SAP BusinessObjects solutions, are now available on demand via AWS. Customers can now deploy their solutions on SAP-certified Amazon Web Services knowing that SAP has fully tested and benchmarked the underlying AWS resources and certified them with similar standards that are applied to servers and virtual platforms.

Amazon Web Services is now a certified SAP global technology partner, a status that places AWS among SAP's most important innovation partners. Amazon and SAP will collaborate to offer customers options and convenience when deploying and supporting SAP solutions in the cloud. New and existing SAP customers can take advantage of the AWS "pay per use" model allowing businesses to reduce infrastructure costs and total cost of ownership. Customers will also be able to quickly scale capacity, both up and down as computing requirements change, paying only for the resources used.

SAP and AWS have completed testing protocols, so that SAP solution deployments on AWS meet the requirements of on-premise SAP solutions. By adhering to the SAP deployment guidelines, customers can properly configure their SAP solution for performance, which helps enable support in a timely manner. A number of third-party providers and strategic integrators will offer services ranging from planning, deployment, migration and other customer support services in backing SAP solutions on AWS.

Despite the recent AWS outage that lasted several days and affected many large AWS customers, SAP officials said they viewed AWS as the best choice for this move. SAP also said they were taking their share of responsibility for ensuring that their systems will keep running in the event of any problems.

The first wave of supported SAP products, available today, includes the entire suite of SAP BusinessObjects solutions and SAP Rapid Deployment solutions supported on Linux Platforms. In the coming months, SAP and AWS plan to further collaborate to launch additional SAP products, including support for enterprise resource planning (ERP) landscapes from SAP and Windows instances.

"SAP and Amazon Web Services both represent companies that value innovation," said Sanjay Poonen, president, Global Solutions at SAP, in a statement. "Today's announcement underscores SAP's continued commitment to innovations in cloud computing, offering a flexible, choice-driven model where customers can select the best option for them when it comes to deploying our business applications and business analytics solutions. As a pioneer in cloud computing, Amazon Web Services has a proven model that provides the combination of low cost - along with stability, reliability and security that is now certified and available to our customers."

"AWS is pleased to work with SAP to offer the benefits of AWS to SAP customers who include many of the largest and most sophisticated enterprises in the world," said Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, also in a statement. "With AWS, SAP customers can take advantage of rapid deployment, reliable customer support models and low-cost, flexible pricing that enables enterprises to focus on the truly differentiating factors of their business instead of the technology infrastructure required to run it."

In an interview with eWEEK, Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations at AWS, said the software currently certified on AWS "represents about half of SAP's business."

Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president of the Global Ecosystem and Channels Group at SAP, told eWEEK, "We forged a collaborative support agreement so we can provide a higher degree of support" for the SAP software running on AWS.

Ichhpurani said the support arrangement details several issues, including "how specific trouble is handled, who should handle what, how the handoff is handled, and what's involved in the specific SLAs [service-level agreements]."

"These offerings are fully supported between SAP, Amazon Web Services and third party Sis [systems integrators]," Selipsky added.

Moreover, "We're certifying the infrastructure for SAP apps," Ichhpurani said. "We ensure that the apps can run on the infrastructure and that it's performant."

Ichhpurani also said SAP has witnessed growing demand from its customers looking to "reduce their TCO [total cost of ownership]" by moving to the cloud.

And both Ichhpurani and Selipsky said the new certification will enable customers who typically spin up AWS resources in a development and test run to be able to also put those applications into production once they've been proven out. Up to now, many SAP customers' developer shops would primarily use AWS as a quick and cheap way to develop and test their applications in the cloud.

Meanwhile, Selipsky said AWS has been seeing demand for SAP apps in the cloud from customers of various sizes and in different geographies, including the U.S., Asia-Pacific Rim and Japan.

"This is the first of a series of steps we hope to make with SAP, including certifying other solution such as ERP."