IBM Corp. said today it’s migrating the bulk of its business processes to SAP SE’s S/4HANA enterprise resource planning software running on its own cloud infrastructure.

The migration will see IBM shift more than 375 terabytes of data to IBM Power systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud, tapping the expertise of its own consultants through IBM Consulting’s RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud program.

IBM said the move is one of the largest-ever corporate transformation projects based on SAP’s ERP software. It’s driven by a need to modernize its business processes and deliver better insights in support of clients running in the cloud.

Using SAP S/4HANA will enable IBM to centralize and standardize its data systems globally, it said, making it accessible in real-time and more easily shareable across its entire organization. The partnership with SAP will also aid artificial intelligence-supported decision-making and workflow automation. Once the migration is complete, IBM said, virtually all of its $58 billion in annual revenue will flow through SAP’s software.

The migration is a huge undertaking that will eventually consolidate more than 300 SAP instances and 500 servers onto IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud. IBM said the move has already begun and that its $13 billion software business unit is already running most of its processes on SAP in the cloud. That initial deployment was focused on its software-as-a-service and billing and payment systems, the company said.

IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said the transformation initiative was a significant milestone because of its complexity and scale. “With this move, and IBM’s experience using RISE with SAP internally, we will be even better prepared to support our clients on their hybrid cloud and business transformation journeys,” he said.

IBM’s migration to SAP S/4HANA is a great advertisement for IBM Consulting, because that’s exactly the kind of thing it does for other enterprise clients with the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud program. IBM Consulting provides a combination of industry, security and technical expertise to help companies manage complex migrations of business systems and applications to SAP’s software.

Having validated the experience by itself, IBM said, it’s now making the same cloud-based computing power that underpinned its own migration available to clients. The expanded premium supplier option with IBM Consulting for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, provides an additional choice to run workloads on IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud.

“IBM will be positioned to provide the highest value of support and flexibility to its clients, allowing them to simplify and accelerate their business transformations while benefiting from the full value of RISE with SAP,” said SAP CEO Christian Klein.

Image: IBM