IBM Corp. and SAP SE today announced plans to launch an edition of the SAP Cloud Platform running on the IBM Cloud for private cloud deployments. The companies said the collaboration will help clients in regulated industries build new applications on the cloud without jeopardizing security and control.

The partnership expands on a 46-year relationship between the enterprise resource planning giant and IBM, which is focusing its cloud strategy on behind-the-firewall deployments.

To that end, IBM has recently established or tightened cloud partnerships with Red Hat Inc., VMware Inc. and New Relic Inc. with the goal of helping enterprise customers move more easily to the cloud and take advantage of recent innovations like containers. “Our goal is to provide the cloud of choice for every enterprise, and particularly for enterprise workloads,” said Bradley Knapp, IBM’s offering manager for IBM Cloud for SAP.

SAP has also been on a campaign to boost his cloud footprint, buoyed by steady growth in cloud-based versions of its enterprise applications. Cloud bookings grew 25 percent in the most recent quarter.

Last year the company changed the name of its offering from Hana Cloud Platform to better reflect a broadened range of offerings while also expanding a partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. More recently, it began diversifying horizontally into manufacturing and the “internet of things” and made its cloud offerings available on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure platform.

“Companies want the flexibility to run their workloads across any platform without having to rewrite everything as they go,” wrote Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of hybrid cloud and director of IBM Research, in a blog post to be published today. “IBM has committed to a hybrid cloud strategy and built an infrastructure-as-a-service platform that offers the versatility of public cloud as well as private, dedicated environments.”

The fundamental difference between running natively on the SAP Cloud Platform and on the IBM Cloud is that the private cloud offering is single-tenant, Knapp said.

“Customers don’t have to worry about noisy neighbor problems or data leaks,” he said. “It’s important for our customers in high regulated industries to know the entire stack from the infrastructure up to the run-time layer.” Developers will also have access to an assortment of development tools from both companies in a private cloud context.

The relationship between the IBM and SAP goes back to SAP’s 1972 founding as Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklungin by a group of five former IBM employees. In January, IBM became the first company to leverage the SAP Model Company services, a set of pre-packaged reference frameworks tailored to specific industries or lines of business. IBM also offers a broad suites of managed and un-managed options for running SAP applications on premises or in the cloud.

“The overlap of IBM and SAP customers is very high,” said David Vellante, chief analyst at Wikibon, a sister company of SiliconAngle. SAP and IBM have both struggled to compete in the general-purpose IaaS market and so have concentrated on enterprise and hybrid cloud opportunities, he noted.

“The majority of business at both companies is on-premises, so it’s no surprise they’re doubling down on on-prem apps and infrastructure,” Vellante said. “It’s low-growth, but high-margin with good cash flow and a big installed base. But ultimately the growth is in the public cloud.”

Image: IBM