Microsoft announces SAP’s choice of Azure to help enterprises transform HR

Microsoft has announced an expanded partnership with SAP to provide public cloud services for the SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite. SAP will make its cloud-based human capital management solutions available on Microsoft Azure over the next five years. This is SAP’s first move to supplement its own infrastructure and operate SAP SuccessFactors solutions in a third-party public cloud, recognizing the experience both companies have in supporting global enterprise clients. With the addition of Azure, SAP has a trusted, global cloud and a powerful data platform to help it drive companies’ human resources transformation, and the potential to dramatically improve business outcomes.

“Microsoft and SAP share a commitment to empowering digital transformation across every aspect of business,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president, Worldwide Commercial Business at Microsoft. “The combination of SAP’s market-leading, innovative human capital management solutions with Microsoft’s intelligent cloud will equip companies around the world to help maximize the potential and skills of their most valuable asset, their people.”

SAP will have significant additional capacity to run operational workloads of SAP SuccessFactors solutions on Azure, beginning with demo environments, to support its continuing client user growth. Azure provides enterprise-grade security, an open developer platform and advanced data services that organizations of all kinds can use to innovate and grow. With nearly 90 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers, the Microsoft Cloud is offered in more worldwide datacenter regions than any other major cloud provider.

“SAP SuccessFactors is the fastest growing core HR solution, and offers an unmatched depth and breadth across the entire HCM suite, of any vendor in the industry,” said Mike Ettling, president of SAP SuccessFactors. “We’ve seen exponential growth in the past two years, with 42 million users now benefiting from our market-leading solutions. In selecting Azure, we will be able to expand our reach even further, with the reliability that is required of these mission-critical applications, and continue to innovate and enhance services to meet client needs across additional environments.”
This deal builds on the longstanding partnership between Microsoft and SAP, including integrations between Office 365 and SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite, as well as SAP Fieldglass Vendor Management System, SAP Ariba and Concur solutions. The Microsoft and SAP partnership also includes broad support for the SAP HANA platform on Azure to enable companies to deliver mission-critical applications and data analytics from the cloud. Microsoft recently announced the general availability of Azure large instances, hardware configurations specifically designed for the largest and most demanding SAP workloads. SAP now enables its customers to build and deploy custom mobile hybrid SAP Fiori apps on SAP HANA Cloud Platform that can be managed, deployed and protected with Microsoft Intune.