Hardware maker Hewlett-Packard and business software developer SAP announced an interesting partnership today.  Customers of HP Enterprise Services will now have access to SAP applications hosted remotely on the company’s datacenters.

“HP bundles the necessary infrastructure, platform and application services in an as-a-service model, enabling clients to pay on a per-seat basis for what they need to run the applications and processes.”

The agreement is still freshly signed and the only app currently scheduled to become available via the platform is SAP (Customer Relationship Management) CRM. However, despite there was mention of more applications made available via the cloud service, there is likelihood the two IT giants will continue to flesh out this approach.

Fusing the cost-effective, agile and cloud-based as-a-service model with the rather traditional BI, widely used SAP CRM may prove to be a very smart combo. It will all come down to how secure it is, and whether or not this may pay off for customers.

Hewlett-Packard is going through a bit of turmoil right now, considering that it just appointed a new CEO and is facing pressure from shareholders to drive value.  After several failed investments the company hopes a cloud and big data strategy will help to achieve that.

One of its initiatives in this area is HP Cloud Services. The public cloud service rolled into private beta in early September, and currently offers only two services: HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage.

SAP is also investing in the cloud, and one of the ways it’s doing that is by expanding its partner ecosystem.  The cloud unit of Australian telco Telstra was recently certified to run SAP applications and deliver them using a pay-as-you-go model. No word on what applications will be delivered yet, but a Telstra exec suggested that the agreement is more significant for SAP than the ones it made with other service providers in the region.