Microsoft Receives 2020 SAP® Pinnacle Award: Public and Private Cloud Provider Partner of the Year

I’m pleased to share that SAP recently named Microsoft its Partner of the Year for the 2020 SAP® Pinnacle Award category of Public and Private Cloud Provider. SAP presents these awards annually to the top partners that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP and helping customers run better. Winners and finalists in multiple categories were chosen based on recommendations from the SAP field, customer feedback and performance indicators.

Microsoft and SAP have a long history of partnership to serve our mutual customers with enterprise-class products, service, and support they rely on to run their most mission-critical business processes. Customers like CONA Services have increased agility and performance to handle over 160,000 sales orders a day by running a 28 TB SAP HANA® system on Azure. Daimler AG reduced operational costs by 50 percent and increased agility by spinning up resources on-demand in 30 minutes with SAP S/4HANA® and Azure, empowering 400,000 global suppliers. Carlsberg modernized its infrastructure and optimized its SAP production landscape by migrating everything, 1,600 TB of data, to Azure within six months.

In October 2019 we deepened this relationship even more by announcing the Embrace initiative, whereby Microsoft and SAP signed a unique go-to-market partnership. As part of this initiative, SAP, Microsoft and our joint partner ecosystem have been working together to give our customers a well-defined path to migrate their SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA® to the cloud, where they can harness the power of their applications to truly drive innovation. Specifically, our teams have been working on:

• A simplified migration from on-premises editions of SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA® for customers with integrated product and industry solutions. Industry market bundles will create a roadmap to the cloud for customers in focused industries, with a singular reference architecture and path to streamline implementation.
• Collaborative support model for simplified resolution. In response to customer feedback, a combined support model for Azure and SAP Cloud Platform will help ease migration and improve communication.
• Jointly developed market journeys to support customer needs. Designed in collaboration with SAP, Microsoft and system integrator partners will provide roadmaps to the digital enterprise with recommended solutions and reference architectures for customers. These offer a harmonized approach by industry for products, services, and practices across Microsoft, SAP and system integrators.

The past few months I had the privilege of working even closer with my colleagues in SAP marketing to really make the promise of the Embrace initiative real for our customers. This promise is all about bringing value to accelerate customers’ transformation to the intelligent enterprise. But I am not alone! Sales, marketing, engineering and support teams across the two organizations have been teaming up to make it easier and clearer for customers to build and run their mission-critical SAP solutions on Azure. In these current times of global disruptions and uncertainty, I believe both companies feel a bigger responsibility to help our customers reduce complexity, empower their employees, drive innovation, and run their businesses more efficiently.

SAP and Microsoft have been partners for more than 25 years. In fact, Microsoft is the only cloud provider that’s been running SAP for its own finance, HR and supply chains for the last 20+ years, including SAP S/4HANA®. Our Microsoft IT team will share their experience of migrating and running our SAP business applications in the cloud in this upcoming virtual session on April 22, 2020. Likewise, SAP has chosen Azure to run a growing number of its own internal system landscapes, also including those based on SAP S/4HANA®. Our commitment to work together to deliver a world-class experience for our customers has grown stronger over the years. I truly believe in and see every day how this partnership is taking a more unified approach to accelerate the value customers get in the cloud and open up new opportunities for growth, innovation and business transformation.

Learn more about SAP solutions on Azure.

Source: Azure Blog Feed