Google this week announced several updates to Cloud Platform partnership it entered into with SAP more than a year ago.
The updates—like the partnership itself—are designed to help enterprises more easily run SAP workloads on Google’s cloud platform. They include a new managed service for SAP HANA, new Google virtual machine instances certified for SAP HANA use and new integrations with Google’s G Suite collection of productivity apps.
In separate but related news, SAP this week launched a new SAP Cloud Platform Software Development Kit (SDK) for Android that Google officials said would allow developers to build native Android applications based on SAP services.
The announcements, at SAP’s annual SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 conference this week in Orlando, broaden existing efforts by the two companies to make their respective technologies more interoperable.
Google and SAP launched the strategic partnership in March 2017. At the time the two companies described the effort as designed to better integrate Google’s cloud and machine learning technologies with SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite and other applications.
The partnership announcement included certification of the SAP HANA in-memory database on the Google Cloud Platform and a commitment by Google to accelerate availability of performance enhancements for SAP HANA on Google cloud.
In the months since the partnership was announced Google has launched several new offerings the most notable of which is a Data Custodian service model for companies with strict requirements for protecting sensitive data.
This week’s update builds on some of the initial objectives of the partnership. According to Google, the company will collaborate with strategic partners to create a managed service for SAP. The offering will include services for managing very large SAP HANA workloads on Google certified hardware, said Pramod Mahadevan, the head of Google’s SAP alliance in a blog June 6.
Organizations that are using SAP HANA as their core in-memory database will also now be able to run it on Google certified 4TB VM instances. “For large enterprises, virtual machine instances with large amounts of memory are a requirement for SAP HANA, and we’ve been rapidly scaling our VM sizes to meet this requirement,” Mahadeven said.
Organizations using SAP HANA for applications like managing supply chains and real-time inventories or streamlining manufacturing operations should benefit from the availability of the 4TB VMs, he noted.
Starting this week, SAP Cloud Platform is also generally available on Google’s cloud infrastructure. Developers can use the SAP technology to build cloud applications on Google’s cloud platform.
Meanwhile, with the new SAP Cloud Platform SDK for Android, developers will get a new toolset for building native mobile applications that use SAP services. The SDK is the result of the collaboration between SAP and Google said Sean Ginevan, Google’s head of global strategy at Android Enterprise in a separate June 6 blog.
It gives developers a way to create apps that combine the look and feel of SAP’s Fiori user interface technology with components from Google’s Material Design app design language for Android, Ginevan said. The SDK offers developers a more streamlined approach to building applications that are capable of taking advantage of SAP’s enterprise services, he said.