German enterprise software giant SAP SE is hoping to crack the Chinese market through a tie up with Lenovo Group Ltd. that will see the two firms develop a number of cloud offerings for local firms.

The deal is an important one for SAP, as it marks the first serious push of its Hana database into China.

“Hana is not really in China in a meaningful way,” Gerry Smith, COO of Lenovo’s PC and server business, told Re/Code in an interview.

Hana’s penetration in the Chinese market isn’t clear as SAP doesn’t offer figures on specific country revenues. However, it does break down revenues by region, and the latest figures show its Asia-Pacific revenues excluding Japan amount to just 12 percent of its total worldwide sales.

Besides pushing Hana itself, the two firms said they’ll cooperate to develop new cloud software offerings based on Hana and Lenovo’s Chinese data centers. In addition, Lenovo and SAP will combine customer acquisition efforts in China, the U.S. and in Germany.

Lenovo made clear its own enterprise ambitions around two years ago when it announced it’s plan to acquire IBM’s x86 server business in a $2.3 billion deal. The company has its sights set on conquering the IT market in China and foreign expansion.

Following on from that deal, Lenovo embarked on a mission to woo partnerships with a number of U.S. and European enterprise giants, including SAP and also EMC Corp. and Nutanix Inc., Re/Code reported. Nowadays, Lenovo uses SAP to power its ERP business, whie SAP runs its Hana Enterprise Cloud services on Lenovo’s systems.

Smith stated in the press release that Lenovo has already shipped over 5,000 SAP Hana-optimized servers.

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