SAP SE today announced the expansion of a four-year relationship between its SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud and Amazon Web Services at Sapphire Now 2017, the software giant’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida.

SAP is touting this as the two companies forging new cloud possibilities. I had a chance to talk with Stephen Spears, Senior Vice President of Hana Enterprise Cloud, and Terry Wise, AWS’s Vice President of worldwide alliances, on the news of an expanded deal and relationship. They were together in Orlando while I talked to them remotely from Palo Alto.

SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud is a fully scalable and secure private cloud offering available only from SAP. It gives you the full power of SAP Hana in a private, managed cloud environment that is supported by the most knowledgeable resources in the industry – from infrastructure to applications.  One trend is that more SAP customers want to move to the cloud and bring along their Hana run-time and move it to a managed service on AWS managed by SAP.

Watch @theCUBE’s coverage replays here:  http://siliconangle.tv/sapphirenow-2017/ (* Disclosure below.) Here’s the full transcript of my conversation on the news:

Furrier: What is the news that you’re announcing at Sapphire?

Spears:   We are announcing an expanded relationship with AWS to includes the use of public cloud infrastructure as a component of our overall Hana cloud strategies.   This gives customers the opportunity to leverage AWS infrastructure as part of the go to market for their cloud journey with SAP focusing on S4 and Hana workloads.

Furrier: Terry, what does this mean for AWS? What are the impacts, and your take on this deal?

Wise: It’s great for our business — it extends the relationship that we’ve had with SAP for a better part of eight years.   This gives customers more choice in terms of how they deploy Hana, and with the jointly engineered offering that we are bringing to market, it will be better, faster, and cheaper.  It will be a better place for customers to run their mission-critical workloads with the cloud.

Furrier: What’s the impact for customers using Hana solutions? Is this just another cloud option? What does it the AWS-Hana Enterprise Cloud relationship mean for customers?

Spears: It really is about choice. We started the Hana Enterprise Cloud four years ago. In those four years, we’ve built a very fast and large cloud business. Customers are saying “we already have established a relationship with AWS and we’d like to continue that journey with them [AWS] help us understand how we can take the Hana Enterprise Cloud managed services and combine them with AWS infrastructure to deliver an end to end cloud service for Hana.”   That is what we are talking about today at Sapphire 2017.

Furrier: Many customers are saying “I have this legacy set of solutions so how do I get it to the cloud.” As they want to get the mix of SAP and AWS, what heavy lifting do you take off the plate for your customers?

Spears: What we provisioning their environments for them we actually take on the support for their ongoing vision in the move to the cloud. What’s at the core of the HEC it’s a way to move a customer from that legacy SAP environment to a cloud stage and ultimately the ability to consume public cloud or SaaS based solutions. When you look at why is such a critical step in the ethos of SAP it’s taking that mysterious thing called the run-time and moving into a managed services environment and doing it with AWS.

Furrier: Terry, talk about AWS. You’ve been doing great business-wise, and lots of enterprise use cases are coming to the market fast. There is a lot of hybrid cloud going on, what is the customer landscape with respect to SAP? How did you guys come together on this deal?

Wise: This deal is many years in the works. It started when we originally certified Hana to run dev and test workloads back in 2012. As enterprise customers became more comfortable with the cloud proposition and AWS specifically, they’ve wanted to move more of their workloads onto AWS for the security, flexibility, efficiency, global footprint, and all the things that customers are using AWS outside of SAP. It was a natural extension to bring more of the SAP workloads into the AWS cloud.

What is different and interesting about this is we largely left it up to the customer or third party to do the coupling management and provisioning for the SAP Hana environment on AWS. What’s super exciting about today is that with Stephen and his team doing the provisioning and the managing, it’s going to create a much better and efficient customer experience.

Spears: This to me is the chance to take all the expertise around running Hana from SAP and mix that with the AWS platform, and bring that tight story to the customer. The customer can have it all. You can leverage the way you’ve been going with your cloud strategy and at the same time get all the added benefits of having SAP provide that managed service. I think that it will be a home run.

Furrier: Is the ethos here to make it easier?

Spears:  Yes absolutely that is the theme here at Sapphire 2017. You’re going to hear about running simple. Both Bill McDermott and Hasso Plattner will share key announcements to make things easier for SAP customers to run simple.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SAP SapphireNow. Neither SAP nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE