Just one day after signing a partnership deal that will make its flagship operating system available on the Oracle Corp. cloud, Red Hat Inc. and Oracle rival SAP SE said they’re cooperating to “significantly increase” SAP’s use of and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat said SAP is in the process of migrating part of its internal information technology infrastructure as well as its Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio to RHEL and will also make the operating system the preferred platform for the enterprise resource planning giant’s Rise with SAP cloud migration initiative. SAP Chief Executive Christian Klein recently called Rise with SAP “one of our most successful offerings ever.”

Red Hat said its Linux offering has enhanced capabilities to support RISE with SAP deployments across cloud environments and to smooth the path toward cloud adoption for SAP customers. Red Hat and SAP will tighten their collaboration over the next year, with Red Hat providing dedicated product engineers and on-site resources to help SAP migrate to RHEL and ensure interoperability.

Much of SAP’s cloud infrastructure runs on the SUSE distribution of Linux, but the company has long supported Red Hat distributions as well. Red Hat didn’t say whether SAP would discontinue its use of other distributions. “Clearly SAP has a massive internal landscape,” said Stefanie Chiras, Red Hat’s senior vice president of partner ecosystem success.

The partnership makes RHEL “the preferred operating system for net new migrations to Rise,” Chiras said. “From a skillset point of view, we believe having a standard operating system is critical for customers who have skills in RHEL. This allows them to more readily streamline their cloud transformation process and bridge to on-premises infrastructure if they have RHEL.”

Chiras said the companies have not committed to extending the partnership to cover Red Hat’s OpenShift version of the Kubernetes orchestrator for software containers. However, she said Red Hat Insights, a managed service that continually analyzes hybrid cloud environments, “has specific capabilities for running an SAP environment best.”

Image: Red Hat