Microsoft and SAP Expand Partnership to Drive Transformation and Accelerate Customer Innovation

February 16th, 2022 Intech Systems Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure

We are living in the era of digitization. Technological advancements are transforming how individuals and organizations engage and collaborate on every level. With intelligent and reliable business solutions, organizations are uncovering new strategies to drive innovation and reinvent themselves in 2022 to become more successful than ever before.

If 2021 was any indication, we are likely to witness a significant advancement in the demand for cloud computing and similar technologies in 2022. While cloud computing technologies were already gaining traction across various industries before the pandemic, remote work challenges and resource impediments during Covid-19 helped accelerate cloud computing trends.

Enterprises are migrating to cloud service providers at an accelerated rate and there are no signs of a slowdown in the years to come. Gartner predicts that more than 80% of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data centers by 2025 as opposed to the 10% in 2021. Another study published in the IDC Executive Summary suggests that by 2027, close to 72% of SAP customers are going to deploy SAP S/4 HANA to the cloud.

Customers want to move to the cloud, but a myriad of different perspectives on how to transition legacy SAP systems to the cloud is creating confusion and hindering the decision-making process, and further delaying customer journeys to the Public Cloud and SAP S/4HANA. SAP and Microsoft Corporation are jointly tackling this issue by providing their customers with a prescriptive harmonized set of recommendations, leveraging the most promising practices in the industry.

SAP and Microsoft have been working together for several years to help their joint customers implement these business solutions to help them gain a competitive advantage over the others. Building on a mutual commitment to streamline customer journeys to the cloud, SAP recently formalized a comprehensive expansion of the existing strategic partnership with Microsoft Corporation to accelerate the integration of SAP on Microsoft Azure.

“The case for digital transformation has never been more urgent,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “By bringing together the power of Azure and Teams with SAP’s solutions, we will help more organizations harness the power of the cloud so they can more quickly adapt and innovate going forward.”

Migrating your SAP solutions to Microsoft Azure offers you increased agility, adaptability, and security. Running SAP workloads on Azure saves significant costs in the short term and creates more opportunities for innovation in the longer term.

SAP customers extensively prefer Azure to move on-premises SAP S/4HANA to the cloud. To enable customers to easily accomplish their goals to run SAP ERP and S/4 HANA on Azure, both SAP and Microsoft are going above and beyond with their engineering investments to simplify and streamline migration, improve operational efficiency, enhance resilience and security and drive transformation in the cloud.

With These New Features, Customers Can:

1. Accelerate migration via supplementary guidance and automation from SAP and Microsoft on the initial configuration and architectural layout of SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure, including recommendations on the usage of the data migration tool.
2. Enhance operational effectiveness to enable a modern DevOps strategy with automatic turnkey operations of SAP S/4HANA in Azure that cover the entire application lifecycle.
3. Bolster security measures with improved network security, threat protection, and end-to-end authentication. Customers can also profit from Azure security services, supported by 3,500 cybersecurity specialists and the industry’s largest compliance portfolio for workloads in the cloud as well as on-premises.
4. Harness the power of AI and analytics to gain real-time and predictive insights from SAP and non-SAP data that can potentially improve business outcomes and drive cutting-edge innovation. Customers can also visualize their SAP data using the Azure Data Factory connector for SAP HANA, SAP ECC, and SAP BW and store data using Azure Data Lake Storage.
5. Reduce business costs by moving their legacy SAP infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. A commissioned Forrester Consulting study suggests that with Microsoft Azure, businesses can experience a three-year ROI of more than 100%, with investment payback in nine months.
6. Gain business insights with Power BI Connectors to understand customer needs, market better to all existing and future customers, acquire, and retain more customers. Azure delivers self-serve, automated machine learning solutions to enable developers to create powerful solutions from within Power BI and Azure Machine Learning Services. Azure provides data platforms with SQLDB, SQLDW, SQL Server, and Data Lake to develop EDW solutions that are very BI friendly with open interfaces for BI tools to connect and visualize the data.
7. Mitigate risks and drive profitability by integrating SAP S/4 HANA with Dynamics 365 CRM. Customers can grow their business from anywhere in the world and become a fully digitized business by bringing all the information important to finance, sales, and other support departments in one place. This integration helps their business become more efficient by streamlining all operations, accelerating the sales cycle, improving customer service, saving time on data entry, assisting in inventory control and warehouse management, and mitigating costs by providing them with a truly collaborative system.

Azure Logic Apps offers over 200 connectors with an easy-to-use, drag & drop workflow development interface. SAP is one of these connectors. Logic Apps can develop complex workflows to send/receive actions by RFC or IDOC from SAP, can connect to Dynamics 365 to retrieve customer information, can respond to SAP, send an email through Outlook, ship the product, send the status to the customer, evaluate inventory, and order more material, among other operations.

These connectors can empower sellers to easily connect with customers through the integration of SAP Sales Cloud with Microsoft Teams. For instance, customer calls can be initiated from within the CRM system without switching applications. This ensures transparency and consistency within the CRM system and saves time and effort via user-friendly workflows. The workflows can be easily defined within the system. If you can imagine it, we can define it.

SAP and Microsoft are working together to accelerate the transformation of organizations into resilient and intelligent enterprises and helping their customers seamlessly migrate their SAP landscapes to the cloud with confidence. With 192 GB to 12 TB SAP HANA–certified virtual machines in more regions than any other public cloud provider, Azure is the industry’s most scalable SAP cloud infrastructure. Azure extends your SAP applications and data by letting you use SAP apps and data with Microsoft Teams and Office apps in Microsoft 365 and building new capabilities with services such as GitHub and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

“New ways of working, collaborating, and interacting completely transform how we operate, said Christian Klein, CEO, SAP. Our trusted partnership with Microsoft is focused on continuously advancing customer success.”

SAP and Microsoft Azure are determined to provide intelligent new ways to make it easier for enterprises to scale and pivot. In 2022, there will be a significant advancement in many areas of cloud technology, and SAP and Azure will play a crucial role in leading this transformation. It is time to bring the intelligence, security, and reliability of Azure to your SAP applications.

Are you looking for a trusted cloud platform for your SAP application? Your search ends here.

We at Intech Systems are here to help you as you adapt to changing business models with intelligent and reliable cloud solutions. We are committed to providing our customers with the best solutions according to their business requirements.

Intech, a Microsoft-certified Gold Partner, is amongst the top Microsoft Dynamics partners in India today and is trusted by 200+ customers globally for its digital transformation solutions. With offices in India and the United States, Intech has over four decades of experience in delivering top-notch technology solutions for Microsoft Dynamics 365, F&O, Business Central, CRM, Power BI, Power Apps, Microsoft Azure Cloud, AI, loT, and other custom-developed applications.

Our firm focuses on implementation, development, and support services for Microsoft Business Applications. Contact us at sales@intech-systems.com to learn more about the key customer advantages of the expanded Microsoft and SAP partnership.

About Intech

Intech Systems is a three-cloud Microsoft-certified partner that boasts deep expertise in providing digital transformation solutions for organizations by leveraging the Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure solution stack. Intech is recognized as a top-tier Microsoft implementation partner globally and specializes in transformative technology solutions such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Business Process Automation, Business Intelligence, Cloud Infrastructure, Data Management, Productivity & Collaboration and Generative AI (Gen-AI) solutions. As a trusted Microsoft Solutions Partner, we are capable of doing complex technology implementations catered to an organization’s specific needs & also rapid solution implementation such as our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central implementation packages. We pair our implementations with end-to-end customer support, offshore development & 3rd party integrations. With offices in India, USA (United States of America), and Singapore, we work with clients across globe to empower businesses with cutting-edge technology solutions. Our latest services aim at delivering business ready AI solutions to the customer, like our  Microsoft Copilot Consulting Services & Solutions for small, medium & large enterprises. Intech’s expertise lies in building software solutions for Manufacturing, Professional Services & Healthcare.  Our Dealer Management System, Sales and Service CRM for Manufacturing, Field Force Automation for Pharmaceuticals and Manufacturing Central are some of our leading industry solutions. Intech’s vision is to catalyze digital futures for operation-centric industries globally, we are at the forefront of innovation, helping organizations drive growth and innovation like never before. Contact Us to learn more.