IBM Corp. said today it’s teaming up with enterprise technology giant SAP SE to help companies move mission-critical SAP workloads to its public cloud infrastructure.

The company said today’s launch of a premium suppler option with IBM for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud will provide both the technology and the consulting expertise needed to help customers migrate on-premises SAP workloads to the IBM Cloud.

In addition, IBM also announced a new program called BREAKTHROUGH with IBM for RISE with SAP, intended to help accelerate customers’ journeys to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The BREAKTHROUGH program is said to use intelligent workflows to help streamline operations, and provides an engagement model to help companies plan, execute and support business transformation.

RISE with SAP is a subscription-based digital transformation offering from SAP that combines a set of products and services. The main component is the S/4 HANA Cloud edition of its flagship enterprise resource planning suite, which allows customers’ cloud infrastructures to run in a SAP data center or with a hyperscaler cloud provider of choice.

IBM said SAP’s enterprise customers have lots of good reasons to consider moving to its cloud. It cites the results of a study by International Data Corp. that it sponsored, which shows how migrating to SAP S/4HANA on IBM Cloud delivered revenue increases for up to 90% of organizations.

The same study also shows that 80% of organizations achieved a reduction in operational costs by moving to IBM’s cloud. Finally, nine out of 10 companies reported “improved productivity” after migrating to SAP S/4HANA on IBM Cloud.

IBM said with today’s announcements, it is now one of the largest cloud infrastructure providers for SAP S/4HANA and its customers, and the only one to offer business transformation and application management services along with that infrastructure.

“We are thrilled to advance our long-standing partnership through RISE with SAP,” said John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting. “Our shared commitment is to meet our clients, especially those in highly regulated industries, where they are in their digital journey, while giving them choices for migrating or modernizing their mission critical workloads with a hybrid cloud approach.”

For customers that may be having second thoughts, IBM reiterated that it and SAP have already successfully helped “hundreds of clients” modernize their systems and business processes with an open, hybrid cloud approach, including Coca-Cola European Partners, Puravankara Ltd. and Parle Products Ltd.

“I have every confidence that the combined expertise and experience SAP and IBM offer will accelerate cloud adoption and business growth for customers across the globe,” added SAP President of Cloud Brian Duffy.

Image: IBM