SAP's popular enterprise apps will soon be available on Microsoft's cloud, Azure. This includes its popular financial software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, SAP's mobile app development software and a version of its super speedy database, SAP HANA.
SAP already has a similar partnership with Amazon in which most of these apps are available on Amazon's cloud, too. Ditto for SAP apps being available on IBM's cloud. But SAP does not have an agreement with Google for its Google Compute Engine cloud.
This isn't a new partnership. Microsoft and SAP have been making their products work together for 20 years. But this is somewhat of a coupe for Microsoft, particularly over Amazon, because Microsoft is also making SAP's apps work with better with Microsoft's cloud version of Office, Office 365, and Windows Phone, the two companies said.
In theory, this means that a company that runs SAP's software in Microsoft's cloud can get all kinds of fancy reports on how their business is doing, delivered to a Windows phone, PC or tablet, with a few clicks of a mouse.
This could help Microsoft and SAP compete with a new crop of cloud-based startups trying offering similar mobile business analysis, including Anaplan (which just raised $100 million) and Tidemark, both run by former SAP execs.
The SAP apps will be available on Azure in June. The integration between SAP's apps and Microsoft's cloud version of Office, Office 365, will be available by the end of this year, Microsoft says.
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