Executive Corner: Jim Comfort discusses IBM-SAP partnership

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IBM today announced a major partnership with SAP. Specifically, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is now available in IBM’s highly scalable, open and secure cloud. To learn more about the partnership and what it means for users, we spoke with Jim Comfort, General Manager, GTS Cloud Development & Delivery at IBM:

What should people know about the SAP partnership? 

There are three major advantages for customers of IBM and SAP who want to take advantage of the cloud opportunity. The first advantage is that this is a global and preferred partnership, so you’re going to be able to work with IBM and SAP globally for consistent, cloud-based deployments, and that’s really unique. Up until now, it’s been SAP or IBM on their own with each of you, and it’s been different in every case depending on what country you live in. Now, with all of the attributes of our global platform in place our multinational clients can provide consistency for all their customers, so anywhere in the world any customer who deploys SAP on the IBM Cloud can get access to the best combinations of applications and services.

The second major advantage is that this partnership covers the full application lifecycle—from development to deployment and delivery in the cloud. Because IBM and SAP are now going to market together, all the capabilities are available to our mutual customers. GBS clients now have access to the blueprinting and creative development side, as well as the demos or pilots and rapid experimentation with SAP HANA analytics. In addition, clients have the ability to deploy in either a scale out model on SoftLayer or a scale up model in Cloud Managed Services.

This partnership brings SAP enterprise applications to the IBM cloud in a consistent way globally. It brings enterprise applications to the cloud across the whole lifecycle. So these elements are no longer delivered in isolation. Instead, it’s an integrated lifecycle from continuous development, iteration and evolution to end deployment. It brings enterprise applications to the cloud in a fully managed manner, securely.

What makes this partnership with SAP ideal?

IBM and SAP are the leaders in our respective markets. SAP is the leader in enterprise applications. IBM has the industry leading cloud portfolio. We both have clients of all sizes, and therefore an expectation of service capabilities—we bring those worlds together on their behalf.

What’s the greatest benefit you see this partnership offering for IBM clients?

Simplicity of deployment for enterprise applications in the cloud. You get the speed and agility of cloud across the entire SAP suite without having to sacrifice deployment security at global scale and without compromising quality.

What differentiates this agreement from any agreements that SAP might have with other providers?

We have the only consistent globally interconnected cloud platform that can support SAP all the way from development through scale production. Everyone else can do some piece of that. Others in the industry might be global, but they’re not interconnected. For instance, clients might work with Amazon for blueprinting and dev/test, but Amazon cannot take the application into production like clients can with ours.

We have a 40-year partnership with SAP, and we’re one of their largest partners. So, IBM and SAP have been going to market together for a long time. That means we aren’t learning how to do this. We’ve done this, we know how to engage with clients, and we know how to engage with clients together. Now we can do that to leverage the cloud opportunity with IBM’s speed and agility.