At Sapphire Now, SAP and Microsoft Usher in New Partnership

"Since becoming the first public cloud platform to be certified to run SAP production workloads in 2011, AWS has continued to innovate to deliver the capabilities and operational performance enterprise customers need to run their most critical business applications with confidence on the AWS Cloud."

Among the companies using the SAP and AWS cloud are General Electric, clothing retailer Brooks Brothers, Ferrara Candy Company, and entertainment production company Lionsgate.

"We believe the IT industry will be shaped by breakthrough partnerships that unlock new productivity for customers beyond the boundaries of traditional platforms and applications," McDermott said.

SAP also used the Sapphire conference to announce new innovations in its latest release of the SAP HANA platform. They include a broad range of enterprise reliability and data-center scale features, including graph data processing and capture and replay capabilities, new hybrid data management service in the cloud, an expanded maintenance strategy, and a new offering for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

The new offering for SMBs, called SAP HANA, Edge edition, offers a low entry price point and is packaged with SAP Predictive Analytics software.

SAP also announced an invitation-only beta program that helps strategic customers get direct hands-on access to hybrid data management services in the cloud.

"Our new beta program breaks down the traditional silos of on-premise and cloud, allowing customers to freely use both approaches for greater agility," said Daniel Schneiss, senior vice president and global head of SAP HANA Platform and Databases at SAP, in a statement. "The true hybrid model allows organizations to test the impact of IT system change requirements in the cloud before committing the upgrades to an on-premises environment, ultimately promoting cost-effective IT management. We designed the program in close collaboration with our customers to shape the next wave of data management services in the cloud."

"The SAP HANA platform has successfully become a proven mainstay data management solution, supporting the full range of analytic and transactional software from SAP, both in the data center and in the cloud," said Carl Olofson, research vice president for application development and deployment at IDC, in a statement. "The latest release of SAP HANA and expanded maintenance program offer customers innovative features for powerful analytics and smarter, more cost-effective IT system management, and make it an attractive platform for an even wider variety of applications for engaging in the digital transformation of the enterprise. Enhancements like these ease that transformation, where future business growth opportunity is to be found."

SAP at the conference also announced the general availability of the SAP Anywhere solution in the United States. The suite of small business applications, including inventory, order, and point-of-sale management, multichannel commerce, and analytics, had been available in China since October and in the United Kingdom since March.

With SAP Anywhere, SMBs can capitalize on retail store sales, build Web sites or online stores, create marketing campaigns, sell products and take payments, manage inventory and analyze business performance from mobile phone or tablet.

SAP also announced several advances in its use of machine learning, tighter security around its applications, and greater customizations.

"SAP is committed to its customers and its customers' customers," McDermott said. "SAP is a customer-driven company."

SAP, McDermott added, "has never been in better shape."

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