More and more enterprise customers are realizing the benefits of moving their core business applications to the cloud. Many have moved beyond the conversation of “why cloud” to “which cloud provider.” Customers want the assurance of performance, privacy and scale for their mission critical applications. Microsoft Azure sets the bar for scale and performance, leads in compliance and trust measure, and offers the most global reach of any public cloud. Specifically for SAP workloads, our strong partnership with SAP enables us to provide our mutual customers best-in-class support for their most demanding enterprise applications.
We’ve invested deeply to ensure that Azure is the best public cloud for our customers’ SAP HANA workloads. Azure provides the most powerful and scalable infrastructure of any public cloud provider for HANA. Azure also offers customers the ability to extract more intelligence from their SAP solution environments with AI and analytics, and our broad, longstanding partnership with SAP includes integrations with Office 365 to help customer enhance productivity, too. Lastly, we have an enormous partner ecosystem ready to help enterprises succeed with SAP solution workloads.
I’m pleased to announce several new advancements to this key area of focus:
Support for running some of the largest public cloud estates of SAP HANA, across both virtual machines and Large Instance offerings.
To power SAP HANA and other high-end database workloads, we’re introducing M-Series virtual machines powered by Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8890 v3 that support single node configurations up to 3.5TB memory. This will allow customers to quickly spin up a new virtual machine to test a new business process scenario and turn it off when the testing is done to avoid incurring additional costs.
Real-time, transactional business applications need scale up power within a single node. For customers using OLTP landscapes like SAP S/4HANA or SoH that go beyond the limits of today’s hypervisors, we’re announcing a range of new SAP HANA on Azure Large Instance SKUs, powered by Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8890 v4 from 4TB to 20TB memory.
SAP business warehousing environments that harness and capture intelligence from massive volumes of data require multi-node, scale-out systems. We’re introducing support for SAP HANA Large instances up to 60TB memory for potential future use for applications like SAP BW, and SAP BW/4HANA.
SAP Cloud Platform: SAP’s platform-as-a-service offering is now available as a public preview hosted on Microsoft Azure. Customers can take advantage of the pre-built SAP Cloud Platform components to build business applications while leveraging the broader toolset of Azure services.
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud: In cooperation with SAP, we are working to make Azure available as a deployment option for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAP’s secure managed cloud offering. Customers will benefit from Azure’s enterprise-proven compliance and security, in addition to close connections between their other Azure workloads and SAP solutions running on Azure in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
SAP and Azure Active Directory Single-Sign-On: SAP Cloud Platform Identity Authentication Services are now integrated with Azure Active Directory. This integration enables customers to implement friction-free, web-based, single-sign-on capabilities across all SAP solutions that integrate with SAP Cloud Platform Identity Authentication. In addition, SAP SaaS solutions (e.g. Concur, SAP SuccessFactors, etc.), as well as core SAP NetWeaver-based solutions or SAP HANA, are integrated with Azure Active Directory.
Last year, Satya Nadella took the stage at SAPPHIRE, announcing a new era of partnership with SAP – and at the time we shared that early adopters, Coats LLC and Rockwell Automation, were using Azure Large Instance infrastructure to run their SAP solution environments. Since then, we’ve seen tremendous momentum with customers choosing to deploy SAP on Azure. Just a few examples of the companies deciding on Azure as their cloud platform for SAP solution landscapes are:
Accenture: This is the largest business warehousing SAP HANA deployment in the public cloud, running Accenture’s own mission-critical financial reporting systems on Azure. For more about Accenture’s use of Azure, don’t miss their session at SAPPHIRE NOW’17 this week.
Pact Group: By choosing to migrate their on-premises SAP servers to Azure, this Asia-Pacific packaging company anticipates annualized savings of 20 percent with their business now running more than 90% of its applications and compute on Azure.
Mosaic: One of the world’s largest producers of phosphate and potash crop nutrients moved all its global financial, commercial, and supply-chain SAP systems to Azure, increasing speed and agility. The company anticipates a year over year cost savings of 20 percent.
IXOM: When they needed to separate from their parent company, water treatment and chemical distributor IXOM chose to move its SAP applications to Microsoft Azure, taking a cloud-first approach to the future.
Subsea7: This world-leading seabed-to-surface engineering, construction and services contractor is working with Accenture to unlock cost savings and greater efficiencies through SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA hosted on Azure. Subsea 7 aims to deliver a simpler, faster and more tightly integrated landscape to its global employees, providing more mobility, agility and an enhanced user experience.
One of the key advantages of Azure is that customers can drive intelligence and insights from their SAP solution environments by integrating with solutions like Power BI and Cortana Intelligence, powering new business opportunities and efficiencies.
Our integration partners are a critical part of SAP solutions on Azure deployments as they help ensure customer success, leveraging their skill and expertise across both the Microsoft and SAP ecosystems. At SAPPHIRE NOW’17, Microsoft will host some of our top Global System Integrator partners including Accenture, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, TCS and Wipro to showcase the value and operational improvements each of these organizations can provide to customers looking to deploy SAP on Azure.
To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617
Customer Story: Matson uses AWS to enable fast analytics
Customer Story: Matson uses AWS to enable fast analytics
Matson uses AWS for IT that enables fast analytics and precise tracking of assets and shipments as they move around the world, they moved their applications from its on-premises data centers to the AWS Cloud and are enjoying faster performance, increased reliability and security, and IT infrastructure cost savings of at least 50 percent.
If you’re like Jenn Schaal, a busy sales manager for an international trade association, your day is filled with client connections, budgets to hit and leads to generate—on top of day-to-day fires to put out. Hitting the end goal—whether it’s a sales target or a client win—takes time and effort. Office 365 helps shave off time throughout the day, so sales managers can meet their goals.
Taking a note from her powerlifting hobby, Jenn wanted to carry over the sense of feeling strong and in charge into her job. She found three ways Office 365 helps her save time, work smarter and be more efficient on the go.
1. Take the hassle out of travel with OneDrive for Business
Travel is almost synonymous with sales, and while it’s invaluable for meeting clients or attending trade events, it can be challenging to stay in sync with reports and presentations being updated back in the office. Jenn knows this all too well. With most of her clients in different markets, she needs to have all the important info in one convenient spot while on the road. With OneDrive for Business, Jenn can pull up files or media kits to share and knows exactly where to find what she needs.
Plus, OneDrive for Business does more than let you view and edit your documents from anywhere. For example:
If your computer happens to die, get lost or is stolen on that important sales trip, you can use someone else’s device and sign in as yourself. Office 365 remembers your most recent documents, so you’ll always have access to client presentations or reports.
Stuck somewhere without internet access but want to get some work done? OneDrive for Business helps you get around your Wi-Fi troubles and work offline by syncing files and folders into your library.
For large ongoing projects, instead of sending specific files, it can be easier to share a whole folder with your client, so that they always have access to the latest reports on OneDrive for Business.
2. Stay on top of what matters with Outlook
Like many people, most of Jenn’s day is spent in Outlook emailing clients, setting up meetings, viewing the team calendar and sending and receiving the latest sales reports. She likes having the same functionality and rich features in the Outlook app, which is especially useful for travel and staying connected on the go.
Power-user tips for smarter emailing and calendaring with Outlook help you get even more done:
Sending a large presentation to a client and don’t want to overflow their inbox? Share as a OneDrive cloud attachment and not only free up space, but make last-minute tweaks without having to re-send the file.
Use Outlook Customer Manager to track customers and see all related info—email, meetings, calls, notes, files, tasks, deals and deadlines—in a convenient focused list view. Deals and even customers can be prioritized and then easily shared with other team members.
3. Stay in touch with your team or clients with Skype for Business
Whether you have a few remote team members, like Jenn, or multiple sales offices across the country, staying connected and aligned on business priorities is key. With Skype for Business, Jenn can easily turn a messaging chat into a call to quickly resolve a problem or close a deal.
There are other ways that Skype can help bridge the distance between teams or clients:
Want to have a call with a client not on Skype for Business? No problem! Meet with up to 250 people—all they need is a phone or internet connection to get started.
Don’t just talk, have a truly interactive meeting by sharing your screen and annotating PowerPoint for real-time collaboration. Then share it all with anyone who couldn’t make it via a recording. You can also use a whiteboard, polls, Q&A and built-in IM during your sales meetings for instant feedback.
Help build connections and relationships with remote clients through video calls. Enjoy industry-leading HD video for online meetings that feel top quality and trustworthy. Focus more on the people in your call, with added features like automatic cropping and head tracking.
Whether it’s storing, syncing and sharing files in OneDrive for Business; smarter emailing or calendaring with the Outlook app; or audio, HD video and web conferencing with Skype for Business; there are many reasons to become a champion for the latest productivity technology within your team or company.