What’s next for SAP on Google Cloud—at SAPPHIRE NOW and beyond

The past year has been a period of rapid change for most businesses. The COVID pandemic, growing focus on sustainability, supply-chain disruptions, and other crises challenged all of us to adapt, evolve, and step up the pace of innovation.

Today, we can see the results everywhere: a rapid transformation of the workplace, a raised bar for digital customer experiences, and a greater emphasis on deriving value from businesses’ IT investments. For businesses running SAP—more than 90 percent of Forbes Global 2000 companies—this has meant accelerating their investments in the cloud in both large-scale and incremental ways.

We’re proud that Google Cloud is supporting many of these businesses like Whirlpool Corporation, including bringing Vodafone’s SAP environment into the cloud, and significantly scaling other SAP customers’ core SAP workloads, as well as helping to modernize ERP systems with SAP on Google Cloud, and more.

As SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference begins this week, we believe businesses have a more significant opportunity than ever to build for their next decade of growth and beyond. Here are several ways we’re working together with our customers, SAP, and our partners to support this transformation.

Supporting ‘RISE with SAP’

Google Cloud is partnering with SAP on its ‘RISE’ initiative, launched earlier this year to help accelerate customers’ business transformations with SAP in the cloud. We’re closely aligned with SAP’s approach, and we’re delighted to work together to make it very simple for customers to move applications and systems into the cloud while minimizing risk and cost, and creating fast time-to-value.

By providing a streamlined path to SAP in the cloud—whether in a private cloud or hybrid environment, or a full-scale cloud migration—we’re helping customers more quickly benefit from flexible and scalable cloud infrastructure, leading AI, ML, and analytics capabilities, Live Migration capabilities to eliminate downtime, and services such as our Cloud Acceleration Program (CAP). CAP provides SAP customers with solutions from both Google Cloud and our partners to simplify migrations. Google Cloud also offers financial incentives to defray infrastructure costs and help customers ensure that duplicate costs are not incurred during migration.

Turning SAP data into valuable insights

Organizations’ business systems like SAP typically contain vast troves of valuable data, which often goes untapped. Today, we offer connectors that enable customers to very easily bring data from SAP Enterprise applications, SAP HANA, and from other sources into BigQuery which helps them collect, integrate, analyze, and manage data across single or mult-icloud environments. Bringing this data onto Google Cloud, and into BigQuery enables customers to not only store and gain rapid insights on large volumes of live data but also visualize insights in Looker to ultimately inform important business decisions. 

“We're more efficient with our SAP data because, now, we're leveraging BigQuery as our enterprise data warehouse,” says Sam Moses, Vice President of Corporate Systems at The Home Depot. “On top of that, now we have better and faster access from a data and analytic standpoint, so our business can make decisions just a lot faster.”

Learn more about The Home Depot at SAPPHIRE in our fireside chat with Sam Moses and Abdul Razack, Vice President, Solutions Engineering, Technology Solutions and Strategy at Google Cloud. 

BigQuery makes SAP data smarter and more valuable

For more advanced analytics needs, many of our SAP customers derive extraordinary benefits from smart analytics—working with BigQuery's AI and ML capabilities, discovering the power of predictive analytics, and processing multi-petabyte datasets faster than previously possible. “We now have at our fingertips a lot of new technologies such as BigQuery, that we've never been exposed to” says Joe Schleupner, senior director of PMO & ITS planning and implementation at Southwire. “We're able to rapidly detect patterns, gather insights from our data, come up with new solutions, and figure out the art of the possible.”

One of our top priorities is to give customers the tools they need to get their SAP data into BigQuery. Whether that data lives in Google Cloud, on premises, or in another public cloud, customers can easily import data into BigQuery through Google Cloud’s BigQuery connector for SAP enabling near-real time analysis of their data sets. This connector will give our SAP customers a faster and more reliable source of data-driven insights and lay the foundation for smarter business decisions.

Innovating our technology and expanding our work with partners

Google Cloud continues to build new capabilities and features to enable SAP customers to digitally transform on a smarter cloud.  We’re also working harder than ever with our ecosystem of partners, to help customers’ SAP environments scale, unlock new sources of value, and stay secure on Google Cloud. 

Persistent disk balances storage cost and performance
Google Cloud's new Balanced Persistent Disk (PD) offering allows SAP customers to balance SSD-based PD cost and performance by running business-critical application servers at a nearly 60 percent lower cost per GB than the SSD storage required to run a production HANA system. And all Google Cloud SSD storage now supports read/write parity, so that storage engineers no longer have to calculate differences between read IOPS and write IOPS when provisioning SAP storage infrastructure.

The largest compute configurations to help scale HANA
New compute families for SAP customers running HANA OLTP and OLAP environments are making it easier to scale without sacrificing cost or performance. These options include 12-TB scale-out solutions  and 18-TB and 24-TB scale-up solutions, and 6TB VM and 12TB OLAP solutions—all of which offer affordable and practical paths to long-term growth.

Apigee gives SAP customers a secure API onramp to enable reliable digital experiences
Our Apigee API management solution gives SAP customers a reliable and scalable way to manage API-based integration with their SAP systems and get value from business data to meet the new and changing demands of the digital economy. Apigee API management allows customers to monitor and monetize APIs which can be beneficial for federated or shared services business environments. Lastly, Apigee API Management abstracts SAP interfaces to enable a seamless migration of the underlying SAP system to the cloud without disrupting the surrounding systems that rely on SAP data.  

Actifio creates a safer migration path for SAP customers
Late in 2020, Google Cloud announced the acquisition of Actifio, a leader in backup and disaster recovery (DR) for SAP environments to help SAP customers move faster and reduce risk during the migration process. We're using Actifio to power our new SAP Migration Quickstart offering. We work with customers to generate a production-like copy of their SAP environment with Actifio and migrate this snapshot from their on-prem environment to Google Cloud.

Our SAP partners are stepping up and standing out
Now more than ever, our partners are stepping up at critical points in the cloud journey to solve implementation challenges, promote interoperability and integration with SAP, and find faster routes to ROI with Google Cloud.

• Making a difference with Smart Analytics: A number of Google Cloud partners, including Informatica, Qlik, Datavard and SoftwareAG continue to raise the bar on innovation, flexibility, and performance with Google Cloud's analytics platforms. They're also showing how data analytics can make a difference far beyond a company’s balance sheet. We see this, for instance, in Qlik's efforts to help its customers use SAP data and Google Cloud analytics to support environmental sustainability initiatives.

• Unlocking new sources of value within SAP: Since being selected as Google Cloud's Information Management (IM) solution, OpenText has proven its value for SAP customers. For example, it manages unstructured document data bringing that information directly to the users in any SAP Business process. It also transforms unstructured document data into a rich, new source of analytical value and drives big efficiency gains, cost savings, and reducing risks. By doing this, OpenText is giving our SAP customers some powerful new ways to become intelligent enterprises.
  

Join us on the journey ahead

There’s so much more to come from SAP and Google Cloud. Join us in our virtual booth this week at SAPPHIRE (register here first) to see Google Cloud’s continued commitment to simplifying and optimizing customers’ journeys to the cloud, and to take a dive deeper into why Google Cloud gives SAP customers a level of performance, reliability, and value that puts them at an advantage. Learn more about SAP on Google Cloud and hear more from customers about their SAP on Google Cloud deployments.