SAP partners with IBM to accelerate HANA cloud

SAP has signed a global partnership with IBM to sell HANA infrastructure-as-a-service hosted at big blue’s cloud data centres, expanding the software vendor’s local points of presence for Australian customers.

SoftLayer's Melbourne data centre.

Local enterprises can now choose between HANA Enterprise Cloud at the company’s current Mascot-based data centre in Equinix's facility or via IBM’s SoftLayer centres in Digital Realty facilities in Sydney and Melbourne.

Apart from expanded points of presence, SAP’s Australian general manager of platform solutions Paul Muller said local customers would benefit from the ability to manage non-SAP solutions through the one cloud provider.

“A customer might want to have their Microsoft mail managed side by side with SAP's business suite as a HANA workload, and our existing relationship doesn’t provide us the ability to offer that,” he said.

“Some government departments and other businesses are governed by strict data sovereignty and residency guidelines and are particular as to where they want points of presence. This relationship offers us the opportunity to provide HANA in a certified operating environment at an accelerated pace."

The partnership involves both IBM Cloud Managed Services and SoftLayer and covers the availability of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. At this point, SAP’s in-memory platform-as-a-service offering, SAP HANA Cloud, is not available through this partnership.

SAP began hosting cloud solutions in Australia in 2012 with Equinix, making a variety of solutions from CRM to supply chain management available.

The Australian operation announced its first instance of HANA enterprise cloud as a colocation with Equinix in April this year.

IBM announced in August that its first SoftLayer cloud services would launch in Australia by the end of this year. The offering is also made available through IBM's existing Sydney Cloud Managed Services in Sydney.