IBM (NYSE: IBM) and SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced the latest milestone in their long-standing partnership as IBM undertakes one of the world’s largest corporate transformation projects based on SAP ERP software, designed to fuel the company’s growth and better support its clients.
As part of the expanded partnership, IBM is migrating to SAP S/4HANA, SAP’s next-generation ERP software, to perform work across more than 120 countries, 1,000 legal entities, and numerous IBM businesses supporting software, hardware, consulting, and finance. The project is focused on improving business processes with RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, and premium supplier option with IBM Consulting. It will ultimately move more than 375 TB of data to IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud. RISE with SAP brings together what businesses need to pursue their digital transformation objectives and accelerate their move to the cloud.
Driven by the need to modernize processes and deliver better insights to support clients running in the cloud, RISE with SAP is helping IBM centralize and standardize data worldwide. With access to the SAP HANA database, data can be accessed in real-time and shared more efficiently among business units and teams. The expanded partnership will also help with improved decision-making supported by AI and automated workflows. Once the transformation is completed, nearly all of IBM’s US$58 billion in revenue will flow through SAP software.
“This expanded partnership will enable IBM to accelerate its business transformation in the cloud and fuel its future growth,” said Christian Klein, CEO, and Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “As a result, IBM will be positioned to provide the highest value of support and flexibility to its clients, allowing them to simplify and accelerate their business transformations while benefitting from the full value of RISE with SAP.”
This business transformation will eventually move more than 300 SAP instances and consolidate 500 servers with the RISE with SAP solution on IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud. The migration to SAP S/4HANA is already in progress across the company’s software business unit. The initial deployment is focused on IBM’s software-as-a-service and billing system and is already benefiting clients and IBM business partners through simplified billing and payment systems while enabling orders and contracts to be processed quickly.
IBM Consulting, with more than 38,000 highly trained SAP consultants, is leading the transformation by providing the advisory, implementation, security, industry, and technical expertise required to move these complex systems and applications to a digital environment. This is another example of IBM and SAP’s accelerated ecosystem strategy, teaming up on both technology and consulting expertise while supporting most cloud environments to help make it easier for clients to embrace a hybrid cloud approach and move their mission-critical SAP software workloads to the cloud.
“Enterprise clients are seeking increased choice and control as they modernize their mission-critical workloads. Enabled by RISE with SAP, this is a milestone business transformation initiative for both companies due to its complexity and scale,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer. “With this move, and IBM’s experience using RISE with SAP internally, we will be even better prepared to support our clients on their hybrid cloud and business transformation journeys.”
Expanded Premium Supplier Option for RISE with SAP on IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud
To provide clients more flexibility and computing power, including those in highly regulated industries, IBM is making the same cloud-based computing power underpinning its own migration available to clients. For clients who run RISE with SAP on IBM Cloud, an expansion of the premium supplier option provides an additional choice to run workloads on IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud.
As a premium supplier, IBM was the first cloud provider to offer infrastructure, technically managed services, business transformation, and application management services as part of RISE with SAP. With clients increasingly leveraging hybrid cloud strategies to modernize their workloads, IBM and SAP are giving clients running on Power servers the ability to use RISE with SAP S/4HANA on Power infrastructure consistent with the architecture they run on-premise. Underpinned exclusively by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, businesses running IBM Power on IBM Cloud will be able to achieve high levels of performance in a cloud environment for their mission-critical workloads, with the flexibility, resiliency, and security features delivered by IBM and Red Hat.
