The IBM-SAP journey to cloud.
For enterprises running SAP applications, the cloud is a powerful opportunity to help with the modernization of business processes on their path to digital transformation. By choosing a hybrid cloud strategy that includes SAP Cloud Platform, single tenant edition on IBM Cloud, enterprises can seamlessly adapt to new business needs while maintaining high security.
IBM and SAP understand that companies—particularly those in regulated industries, such as government and financial services—need to execute with security underpinning their innovation journey. Accordingly, IBM continues to enhance our secure and open hybrid cloud strategy for SAP workloads.
Gain new business value using SAP Cloud Platform, single tenant edition on IBM Cloud
This is why we are making the SAP Cloud Platform, single tenant edition available for some early access customers as a subscription from SAP. This is a critical part of our hybrid cloud offerings for SAP, enabling companies in regulated industries to extend their SAP environments securely to a single tenant cloud instance of SAP Cloud Platform. It is a best-of-breed application development platform based on IBM Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment, and it embeds the joint open source projects between IBM and SAP over the past few years.
This enables our IBM-SAP customers to extend SAP business applications, achieving a Bi-Modal ERP which runs the business and becomes its innovation platform. For example, extending SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, etc. with SAP Fiori UX with SAPUI5 or SAP Fundamentals combined with SAP Mobile Services and SAP Portal, which is all powered by secure, dedicated IBM Cloud Infrastructure.
SAP Cloud Platform, single tenant edition runs on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service in the same IBM data center region as other IBM-hosted SAP business applications on dedicated single tenant infrastructure. This new offering enables customers to leverage a development platform from SAP that enables innovation and cloud native SAP extensions to core business applications, while also expanding into the public cloud to support their mission-critical SAP apps in a highly secure way.
Features and benefits
The SAP Cloud Platform, single tenant edition on IBM Cloud provides key benefits for customers, including the following:
- Security by design: Running on dedicated single tenant infrastructure, it can be enhanced with the addition of IBM Cloud Direct Link for a secure, low-latency connection into the existing corporate network. This offering uses Bring-Your-Own-IP to preserve the isolated networking layer using IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud and provides the ability to access other IBM Cloud services over the private network with zero network transfer fees.
- Compliance by design: Running workloads on IBM Cloud with a global data center footprint helps businesses to meet their unique data residency requirements (such as GDPR) and their compliance requirements (such as HiTrust, ITAR, FedRAMP, FISMA, C5, and others).
- Performance by design: Running SAP business applications on SAP HANA database servers requires high-performance SAP-certified Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to execute millions of business transactions. Using SAP Cloud Platform from within the same network reduces latency for all cloud native SAP interactions with other SAP business applications, enabling the business to reap the full value of high-performance with SAP HANA and high-innovation with SAP Cloud Platform.
Looking ahead
The pilot program of SAP Cloud Platform, single tenant edition on IBM Cloud is underway, and several businesses are now using it for private cloud deployments on the IBM Cloud.
U.S.-based technology company WorkMerk (representing the third-largest transportation authority in the United States) and Technical University of Munich (TUM) are using this solution to develop, extend, and integrate state-of-the-art applications. WorkMerk’s application improves officer and community safety over mobile devices, while the SAP University Competence Center (UCC) at TUM is using an online portal service for students and lecturers to develop curricula and teach the latest state-of-the-art technologies across various universities around the world. Both government organizations require a dedicated, isolated environment due to regulatory and privacy requirements.
Benefit from the full capabilities of IBM Cloud for SAP
The wealth of knowledge from the long-standing relationship between IBM and SAP, which is backed by more than 35,000 SAP-focused practitioners, is infused into our IBM Cloud for SAP portfolio.
Today, IBM is also announcing today a new open-source project which enables developers to use IBM Watson Developer Services from SAP—the ABAP SDK for IBM Watson. This kit specifically supports developers who want to embed capabilities from IBM Watson directly within their SAP landscapes and was created by the ABAP specialists from across IBM as a community-driven SDK created for the ABAP open source community.
Unlock business value with SAP Cloud Platform, single tenant edition on IBM Cloud
Seamless access to SAP Cloud Platform and SAP-certified infrastructure to run business applications with high security is just the beginning of what is possible. Together, IBM and SAP provide best-in-class options to build and modernize your business applications, whether it’s on-premises or in the private or public cloud.