At its ongoing Google Cloud Next, Google announced a brand new partnership with SAP. The partnership will see the former deliver the latter’s SAP HANA in-memory database through the Google Cloud platform.
The deal is pretty important for a variety of reasons. First of all, Google has received a significant partner that has a vast industry presence. in fact, vast does not even cover it. Over 76 percent of the world’s transaction revenue touches SAP’s systems one way or the other. The company counts a massive 345K customers in 190 countries and its customers represent over 87 percent of Forbes Global 2000 companies.
How does this affect Google? Well, thanks to its partnership with SAP, the search engine giant will find itself riding into the boardrooms of many of its partner companies. And one thing could lead to another with Google grabbing some new customers for its cloud services. Secondly, SAP is a huge entity all in its own right and Google Cloud has received a major customer through this deal.
Meanwhile, this partnership is also an indication of SA’s changing method of delivery. SAP sells quite a suite of software services to client companies. Its software has to do with technology, human resources and finance. The company has usually delivered its software on premise but recently, it has started opting for a through-cloud delivery method — the advantages of which are pretty obvious,
SAP already has its own data centers, which is only to be expected from a company of this massive magnitude. However, customers will now be able to chose to deploy Google’s Cloud services as well. This should definitely push the company’s business as enterprises that use SAP’s services start turning to Google Cloud from the traditional AWS or Azure.
Interestingly, despite the fact that the data will be stored and will run on Google’s servers, SAP will maintain full responsibility of the data. This is also a kind of testing ground for SAP before it decides to build its own data centers, or choses to stick to infrastructure providers.
