SAP is making its Business Suite available via cloud as a subscription service, the company announced Tuesday. SAP also announced on Monday that it has established its first two data centers in the Asia Pacific region, which will help support its cloud offerings.
SAP plans to migrate customers to the cloud with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, citing McLaren, Schaidt Innovations and Levi Strauss as early adopters of the service. The company is offering its flagship product Business Suite, as well as Business Warehouse and the SAP HANA platform on a subscription basis, and delivering them in a private managed cloud environment.
SAP announced HANA Cloud Platform in March, so making its suite of business applications available via cloud is a continuation of SAP’s move into cloud services. That move includes a January decision to increase investment in cloud services and forecast higher revenues from them.
“Today is a significant step forward for SAP’s transformation, as we are not only emphasizing our commitment to the cloud with new subscription offerings for SAP HANA, we are also increasing the choice and simplicity to deploy SAP HANA,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Products & Innovation. “In addition, we are expanding our global presence with a comprehensive in memory-centric data center plan, dramatically simplifying our customers’ IT landscapes.”
Prices are not included in the announcement, but will likely be comparable to rival Oracle, which has embraced cloud computing much more quickly, and to other cloud business app offerings, such as those offered by Netsuite and Salesforce.
SAP has also bolstered its migration services to help existing customers transition to the cloud and integrate cloud and on-premise services. Existing maintenance agreements for support and upgrade of migrated apps will be honored by SAP.
Previously, enterprises could subscribe to SAP HANA as a cloud service through partners Savvis or HP, which provide the hosting and in HP’s case the platform.