The IT industry is home to some of the fiercest competition in the B2B sector. Small businesses have choices when it comes to hardware and software products. This means that most IT companies don’t receive as much praise for their products and services as they should. Now, there’s news to be excited about; SAP apps run on Azure.

Microsoft took the world by storm when it recently announced its cloud partnership with Germany’s leading enterprise software manufacturer, SAP, meaning that SAP apps run on Azure. But what does this alliance mean for small businesses? This partnership would be like Mercedes Benz joining forces with Tesla, two of the best -- each with undeniable capabilities.

What does it involve?

This powerhouse partnership focuses on the co-engineering of new products, services, and joint support to help businesses of all sizes harness the power of the cloud, business data, and advanced analytics. 

Both companies plan to extensively deploy each other’s technologies to come up with best practices that will benefit end users.

One example of this is HANA, SAP’s cloud service, which can now be run on Microsoft Azure. This combination integrates two of the industry’s more versatile products -- SAP’s application management and product expertise and Microsoft’s highly intelligent and dynamic cloud environment. 

What are some of the benefits you can expect?

So far, this partnership extends only as far as SAP applications running on the Microsoft's Azure platform. But this alone is a huge deal. By running SAP’s database management solution on Azure, you can expect faster financial analysis, a more secure, managed cloud, and that a broad array of SAP apps run on Azure.

Such integration brings us back to what the two tech giants set out to do: integrate the best services in the IT world to make something even better. Running SAP apps on Azure will allow you to do more work with fewer servers and significantly speed up server installation when you need more capacity.

Essentially, you’ll be able to run mission-critical applications and workloads on the right platforms, without having to worry about tedious workarounds and compatibility issues. Even better, you’ll open up new opportunities in business intelligence to increase efficiency and speed up product and service delivery.

With SAP and Microsoft’s combined compliance portfolio, enterprise-level SLAs, and world-class support, it’s no surprise that business owners are thrilled to see what lies ahead for cloud technology.

What other companies have to say

CEO and Senior VP of The Coca-Cola Company, Barry Simpson, called this partnership “an extremely important development for the Coca-Cola system” since both companies’ aligned engineering, sales, and delivery will help Coca-Cola accelerate their digital business processes substantially.

Columbia Sportswear Co.’s CIO and VP, Mike Hirt, said the partnership is a “customer-driven growth revolution.” Hirt added that the “close alignment between the software giants will provide the technological underpinnings to enable Columbia to better serve our customers around the world.” Hirt also noted that Microsoft and SAP are helping companies do what they must: make and fulfill commitments to customers.

Whatever impact this strategic partnership will or will not have on cloud providers like Amazon, IBM, and Oracle, it will surely benefit businesses that are looking to migrate to the cloud.

As an official Microsoft partner, the SimplyClouds team are looking forward to this partnership. We’ll keep you posted about any other updates from Microsoft and SAP. In the meantime, if you have any questions about Microsoft Azure, or cloud technology in general, you know whom to call for answers.