UPDATED 14:00 EDT / MAY 16 2021

CLOUD

Inside the IBM-SAP partnership for painless cloud migration

Adapting to a digital economy and transitioning to the cloud is a challenging task many businesses and operations are facing today, especially in a world temporarily on hold as it battles a pandemic.

As strategic partners, SAP SE and IBM are working together to make this transition easier, more cost-effective and more flexible through a new software-as-a-service system.

“The typical cloud journey has four different aspects to it,” said Madhuri Chawla (pictured), director of strategic partnerships and enterprise application services at IBM. “You will need the advice, so you need systems integration services to help customers define the scope of what they actually want to either upgrade, make current as well as what workloads they want to move to the cloud. We can help customers with our systems integration services through IBM Global Business Services. We can help them with their entire planning, and we can help them with the actual move to the cloud.”

Chawla spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during IBM Think. They discussed the IBM and SAP partnership, SAP’s move to HANA (a high-performance in-memory database) hybrid clouds, and more.

Decades of camaraderie

SAP and IBM have been strategic partners for over 46 years, giving the businesses ample time to develop a working relationship that builds on each company’s strengths.

“We’ve been managing the production workloads for large customers in many different industries. Their entire supply chains, human resources and financial systems are running on IBM, either in the old traditional hosting models or in our cloud models, ” Chawla said. “We have made sure that we do whole different types of certifications with SAP to stay current. Many of these certifications are done every two years. Some are done every year.”

Even with a long-standing relationship, the practices and strategies of the companies are constantly shifting to adapt to the rapidly changing nature of a digitized environment. Notably, IBM is changing gears to create a reputation as a top hybrid cloud company.

“That’s what the whole mission is all about. We want to make sure that customers are consuming IBM services, and IBM wants to meet them where they want to be,” Chawla said. “So there’s flexibility of choices in terms of hybrid in a cloud deployment model. Most customers in the SAP area are looking for either just a pure private cloud deployment or they’re looking for a public cloud deployment or a combination.”

Combined with the new SaaS model, these changes give customers more choice and flexibility and alleviate technological insecurity, Chawla concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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