IBM rolls out new services, certifications with SAP for open hybrid cloud

New York based technology major IBM has announced new services and partnerships that have been designed to help clients accelerate their hybrid cloud journeys through the deployment of SAP software workloads either from the cloud or via existing on-premise functions.

IBM, which recently split into two entities with the main company focused on the $3 trillion dollar hybrid cloud, said that IBM and SAP will expand their ecosystem of grid security infrastructure (GSI) providers and independent software vendors (ISV). The partners include enterprise data management firm Syniti, Indian information technology services majors TCS and Tech Mahindra, among others, to help simplify and speed how clients run their SAP workloads on IBM cloud.  

One of IBM’s recent studies -- re-imagining service delivery -- showed that  64% of executives plan to shift to a cloud-based business model over the next two years. This would also push the need for deployment and acceleration of enterprise resource planning and business process workloads while keeping security as a topmost agenda.

"The global pandemic has seen a year's worth of digital transformation efforts with the acceleration of cloud adoption compressed into months,” Harish Grama, general manager, public cloud, IBM said. 

Grama added that IBM open hybrid cloud architecture will help clients with a variety of choices in how they approach their digital transformation. According to the company, its Syniti’s Knowledge Platform Cloud Edition-- IBM’s trademark cloud offerings -- based on IBM Cloud is helping speed project times by upto 46% for clients deploying SAP S/4 Hana datasets. 

Meanwhile IBM and TCS have entered in a joint go-to-market initiative to focus on accelerating cloud transformation journeys with TCS’s industry solutions.

For SAP S4/HANA deployments, IBM has bundled its services along with IBM Cloud and IBM global financing to offer clients a hybrid option to allow customers to selectively deploy applications on its new hybrid cloud based platform.       

Additionally, IBM also announced new SAP certifications to allow customers with more options as to where to run their SAP software workloads.  The new offerings include IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, which helps customers run their workloads on a virtualized infrastructure hosted by IBM data centers.

IBM Power Systems Virtual Server is a private infrastructure-as-a-service offering with access to the full catalog of IBM Cloud offerings.

Read: IBM to move a third of India staff to new cloud unit: Reports

Other certifications include faster data insights from SAP through Intel Xeon scalable processors.

Thirdly, in a certification with NetApp, IBM will allow for NetApp certified storage on SAP workloads on IBM hybrid cloud. This was previously only present on on-premise.

IBM said that it has worked with SAP for over 5,500 individual projects based on the open hybrid cloud approach.

“The expansion of IBM's strategic partnership with SAP by launching  new services is designed to speed a secure adoption of hybrid cloud capabilities for clients running SAP workloads," Shailesh Agarwal vice president – strategy and IBM Cloud Platform, IBM India/South Asia said.