Microsoft Azure for SAP

At a time when the Cloud is becoming the new standard in terms of hosting solutions and infrastructure management, the choice of whether or not to move to the Cloud is becoming a central question for IT Departments and is pushing them to reflect on the future direction of their technological trajectories. Indeed, the question is no longer "How?" but rather "When?". All CIOs are now faced with this choice, some have already made it, others have already deployed all or part of their infrastructure in the Cloud.

The efforts of the various service providers in terms of innovation have made it possible to democratise this technology on the one hand, and on the other, to easily deploy or migrate one's infrastructure to the cloud. Also, feedback is now pushing in this direction, driven by new expectations such as agility, resilience, scalability and optimisation of an information system.

Many customers will ask themselves the question of migrating their SAP infrastructures to the cloud when they migrate to the latest version of SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA.

Moving to the cloud will save us money, but it's really about becoming more agile and innovative.
Microsoft SAP Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) Program Manager

To support this transformation, Applium has chosen Microsoft and its Azure offering. 

OK, but why Microsoft Azure?

Despite a certain delay in making an SAP-certified Cloud offering available on the market, Microsoft Azure has been able to bounce back in leaps and bounds since it has experienced a constant growth rate over the last few years, to the point of becoming the second major Cloud provider. An aggressive policy in terms of financial and human investments has enabled the Redmond firm to catch up. With a strong presence in the enterprise market, notably through its Office 365 solutions, we are convinced that Microsoft Azure will benefit indirectly from this historical link. We also believe that Azure better meets the needs of customers and the requirements of the cloud, particularly through a wide range of associated services. Microsoft is thus establishing itself as a new reference in the market of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS infrastructure providers via their Azure service!

SAP and Cloud ?

2012 was the year in which the German software editor worked to open up its solutions to the public cloud. It was in 2011 that the company really began this technological transition with the acquisition of SuccessFactors, with others to follow. In the years that followed, SAP multiplied its efforts to open up to the public cloud and the world of Open Source, even going so far as to announce an internal restructuring of its services. In 2016, the company embarked on a multi-cloud development strategy by signing partnerships with the main players in the market, such as Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM and Microsoft, with the aim of facilitating the porting of its ERP to other clouds than its own. SAP is highlighting these new partnerships as a way of refocusing on its activities as an enterprise solution provider. The publisher therefore sees the cloud as an opportunity to make available innovative tools based on machine learning or analytics in order to respond to its customers' operational problems.

The move to the cloud of the entire SAP infrastructure on Microsoft Azure, as well as around fifteen of the German editor's critical systems, finally convinced us of the relevant choice to position ourselves on the Microsoft Azure service rather than another. Since 2019, Applium has therefore decided to focus part of its activities on democratising the use of the SAP ecosystem in the Azure cloud.

SAP on Azure is the combination of two historical IT powers. One is a pioneer in personal computing and office tools, the other is a world leader in business solutions for enterprises. SAP on Azure provides a complete suite of innovative solutions integrated directly into the cloud.