SAP teams up with long-time ally IBM in the cloud

SAP’s Hana Enterprise Cloud service will be made available through IBM’s global cloud infrastructure, in a move that expands options for customers around the world who are considering moving their business applications off-premises to the cloud. The deal will give SAP access to a total of 60 data centers between its own and IBM’s, said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president and head of Business Development and Strategic Ecosystem at SAP.

German business software company SAP and computing giant IBM are teaming up in the cloud. SAP says it has tapped IBM’s SoftLayer service to run its suite of cloud-ready business applications. The plan calls for SAP to let its customers run its HANA Enterprise cloud on IBM’s SoftLayer, something that Amazon’s Web Services cloud unit has been able to do for some time. One point of the move, said SAP exec Kevin Ichhpurani, is to take advantage of IBM’s global footprint so that customers using SAP applications can do so within the borders of their own countries. “A lot of our customers are concerned about data sovereignty and privacy controls,” he said. “IBM was the obvious choice to help us address that.” Big Blue said earlier this year it would spent $1.2 billion to expand SoftLayer by building 15 new data centers around the world. SAP already has 20 data centers of its own.