AWS, SAP, and APN partner innovation: It’s still day one

SAP customers often ask me, “what sets AWS apart from other cloud providers”, and there are many ways I could answer. I could cite the more than 5,000 SAP customers who have trusted us through the years. Since 2012, SAP on AWS customers have accessed an unmatched pace of innovation and the broadest range of cloud-native services for SAP. But these differentiators are only the output of a solid foundation – our strong collaboration with SAP and AWS Partner Network (APN) SAP Competency Partners. AWS has not only worked with SAP, but also built out the most mature SAP partner community among cloud providers.

This all started in 2008, when SAP became an AWS customer – a move demonstrating SAP’s desire to drive innovation, and pass it on to their own customers. As more customers saw the benefits of AWS and inquired about extending these benefits to their SAP environments, AWS and SAP began working together to certify and engineer solutions for customers to run their SAP systems on the cloud.

Thirteen years later, SAP is still an AWS customer. In fact, they rely on AWS to help customers build their own systems of differentiation by running the vast majority of their PaaS offering on AWS—ten SAP Cloud Platform regions run on AWS. In the past 12 months SAP launched SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, and SAP HANA Cloud on AWS. Other solutions like SAP Concur and NS2 have been running on AWS for many years.

13 years of joint innovation, driven by customer obsession

The collaboration that led to the initial customer deployments of SAP on AWS in 2012 was a direct response to our customers’ business needs. Today, that same customer focus is still what drives our joint innovation. Both AWS and SAP maintain dedicated teams whose responsibility is to understand SAP-specific customer demands to inform upcoming projects. As a result, we can provide customers the resources they need to support whatever SAP strategy aligns with their business.

Thanks to this collaboration, customers can run some of the largest and most demanding SAP workloads on AWS: AWS supports SAP S/4HANA (OLTP) with up to 48 TB of memory and SAP BW/4HANA (OLAP) with up to 100 TB of memory using cloud-native instances in scale out architectures.

The speed at which we have built out these capabilities demonstrates how fast the partnership has moved and will continue to move in order to address customer feedback – even after all of these years, it is still “day one” for AWS and SAP.

To continue to support SAP on AWS customers, we’ve recently launched two new offerings. First, AWS Launch Wizard for SAP simplifies the provisioning and configuration of SAP environments. Second, AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA reduces the cost of backing up your SAP HANA database by eliminating the need for third-party backup tools.

A partner community to support any SAP strategy

As we saw the critical role that technology and consulting partners play in helping customers reach their desired outcomes more quickly and reliably, we wanted to ensure partners were proficient in implementing and innovating SAP on AWS. As a result, in 2013, we launched the APN SAP Competency program. To receive SAP Competency, APN partners pass business, technical, and specialized trainings, prove their knowledge of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and demonstrate previous SAP on AWS customer success. If you need partner assistance on your SAP project, AWS will refer you to APN Consulting Partners that have already received the SAP Competency. Finally, AWS checks in regularly with customers to ensure they are receiving a bar-raising partner experience.

More than 5,000 active AWS customers run SAP on AWS and over half have deployed SAP HANA-based solutions on AWS. AWS also works with thousands of APN Partners. While many of these organizations leverage AWS for reliable infrastructure for SAP workloads, we also see customers and partners using AWS as their platform of innovation. Today, we have a rich set of partners that help customers with: industry and line of business focused offerings, digital transformations (including moving to SAP S/4HANA), managed services, data and analytics, machine learning, and other tools and offerings that help them look beyond infrastructure to get more from their SAP investments.

Another area partners are delivering new customer value is through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for SAP. Launched earlier this year, AWS MAP for SAP gives eligible customers access to consulting support, training, and service credits when they commit to running eligible SAP workloads on AWS. These benefits not only accelerate adoption and enable a strong operational foundation for SAP on the cloud, but also offload a significant portion of migration costs.

A number of partners have invested in the MAP for SAP Program and established SAP to AWS migration factories which offer standardized services to reduce risk and uncertainty for customer migrations. Partners who have recently established SAP to AWS migration factories and joined MAP for SAP include: Capgemini, Cloud Comrade, Deloitte, InfraBeat, Lemongrass, Syntax, LTI, Minfy, Protera, Secure-24, Velocity, Wipro, Woongjin, and YASH Technologies.

Joint innovation will always begin with the customer

Through all the examples I’ve detailed above, it is clear that working with SAP and our APN partners allows us to deliver value to SAP customers, even as their needs evolve. Moving forward, AWS, SAP, and the APN SAP Competency Partners will continue to listen to what our customers need and enhance our offerings accordingly.

If you have a specific need or use case you would like AWS and SAP to support moving forward, reach out to sap-on-aws@amazon.com.