SAP and AWS enable enterprises to innovate like startups

SAP and AWS announce their project Embrace, a new partnership program aimed at simplifying customers’ SAP S/4HANA journey and accelerating their ability to innovate.

Orlando, FL — May 9, 2019 — Today, SAP announced the Embrace project, a collaboration program with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Global Service Integrators. Embrace puts the customer’s move to SAP S/4HANA on AWS in the language and context of their industry through reference architectures.

AWS is a proud participant in the program, which will simplify the move to S/4HANA and accelerate enterprises’ ability to innovate like startups in an industry-relevant context. By using a Market Approved Journey, which is supported by reference architectures that combine SAP Cloud Platform with AWS services, we are easing the dataflow across platforms.

SAP’s Intelligent Enterprise portfolio and AWS Cloud services, with co-innovated automation, are enabling enterprises around the globe to quickly transform themselves to become “start-up-like”: using intelligent technologies natively, innovating business models faster, serving their customers globally by default, and running at the lowest-cost. Together, SAP and AWS are building a set of unique offerings aimed at retiring the technical debt that exists in today’s IT landscapes and at accelerating innovation by providing instant and on-demand access to higher-level services like Machine Learning, Data Lakes, and IoT.

Here is an example of how AWS is helping ENGIE in their SAP S/4HANA journey:

“Our CEO, Isabelle Kocher, has defined a new strategy for ENGIE focused on decarbonization, digitalization, and decentralization. This transformation strategy has placed a much greater emphasis on data and operational efficiency,” explains Thierry Langer, Chief Information Officer of the Finance division at ENGIE. “48 hours after the AWS team provided a comprehensive demonstration of what was possible on AWS, we decided to migrate our non-production environment to AWS. After we completed that step, we chose to migrate our entire platform and production environment as well. I saw the difference between running SAP on premises and on AWS, and there was no question it would be advantageous for us to migrate to AWS.”

SAP and AWS will be leveraging our existing collaboration efforts to support the Embrace program:

S/4HANA Move Xperience: A comprehensive offering allowing customers to transform and test their legacy ERP systems on SAP S/4HANA. The offering leverages automation, a prescriptive set of tools and architectures, and packaged partner offerings to migrate and convert in a matter of days. Customers can start with their existing SAP ERP system or choose a fresh but accelerated start by leveraging the SAP Model Company industry templates. The test environments will be made available to customers free of charge on SAP-certified, production-ready AWS environments. The S/4HANA Move Xperience offering enables customers to validate their business case and to assess the effort involved in transforming to S/4HANA.

SAP Cloud Platform on AWS: Today, over 160 SAP Cloud Platform services are now supported across seven global AWS Regions (Montreal, Virginia, Sao Paulo, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney). SAP and AWS are now connecting both platforms to enable developers to easily design and deploy solutions that are context-aware through the semantic and metadata layers of underlying SAP business applications. On Wednesday, we launched the IoT cloud-to-cloud option and introduced the edge-to-edge offering (coming soon). We also introduced the AWS Lambda for SAP Cloud Platform API Management reference architecture, which was a frequent request by customers who want to mesh business processes powered by SAP S/4HANA applications with AWS services by using SAP Cloud Platform Connectivity.

Market Approved Journeys: To further simplify and help customers innovate faster within their industries, SAP, AWS, and our joint Global System Integration partners will release Market Approved Journeys. These innovation paths map how the services and solutions of both companies enable customers to integrate and extend beyond the core ERP solution. Through Market Approved Journeys, customers and partners can leverage interoperability and design patterns that are common in their industry, and then they can turn their focus to how they want to differentiate their organizations.

According to research firm Gartner, Inc., “Two-thirds of all business leaders believe that their companies must pick up the pace of digitalization to remain competitive.”* As leaders in enterprise application software and cloud services, SAP and AWS are aligning closely to provide customers with the safe and trusted path to digital transformation.

If you are attending SAPPHIRE NOW 2019 in Orlando this week, I hope you stop by the AWS booth (#2000) and talk to our SAP on AWS experts about how we can help you simplify your SAP S/4HANA journey and innovate faster!

* Gartner, Smarter with Gartner, Embrace the Urgency of Digital Transformation, Oct. 30, 2017, https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/embrace-the-urgency-of-digital-transformation/