SAP straddles Microsoft, Amazon clouds

More cloud CRM alternatives open up.

SAP customers will soon be able to run a host of the German vendor's enterprise management software, including BusinessObjects, on the Amazon Web Services cloud.

The company announced AWS was certified as its new technology partner during the SAP Sapphire conference in the US.

The first round of SAP's Amazon-cloud products will only run on Linux instances, including SAP's CRM, supply chain and procurement, manufacturing, finance and IT help desk suites. 

Still in the pipeline was support for its enterprise resource planning "landscapes" and the option to run SAP on Windows instances. 

SAP then coupled with "partner of the year" Microsoft to announce lower integration and development costs for .NET developers, as well as new provisioning and management controls for SAP on Microsoft’s cloud, Azure.

“Microsoft and SAP also plan to provide integration between SAP’s landscape management software, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V technology, bringing greater agility to cloud management and deployments,” according to Ted Kummert Senior Vice President, Business Platform Division, Microsoft.

"SAP and Microsoft plan to offer interoperability and a native development experience, so that a .NET developer can easily build applications in visual studio that run across the SAP and Microsoft platforms," said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board, Technology and Innovation, SAP.