Software giant SAP SE’s cloud platform is now generally available on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud.

Microsoft said at SAP’s Sapphire Now conference Tuesday that developers now can deploy Cloud Foundry based on SAP Cloud Platform to Azure in its West Europe region. “We’re working with SAP to enable more regions in the months ahead,” Microsoft officials added in a blog post.

The Redmond, Washington-based company also announced the availability of the largest SAP HANA-optimized virtual machine sizes on its cloud in the coming weeks. The VMs – the Azure M-Series – are powered by Intel Corp.’s most recent Xeon Scalable processors and support large memory virtual machines with up to 12 terabytes of storage.

The announcement that SAP’s business and service software is available on Azure has been a long time coming. The companies actually announced their intentions to do so as far back as 2011. They also said in 2014 that they were planning to certify several of SAP’s business apps on Azure, but there was no mention today of why it took so long to achieve this. Many of SAP’s core applications have been available on rival Amazon Web Services Inc.’s public cloud since 2011.

SAP also said that in 2017 it had begun to “leverage Azure as an infrastructure-as-a-service platform.” Now, it says it expects to move 17 systems, including its S/4HANA system for its Concur Business Unit to Azure by the end of this year.

The partnership between Microsoft and SAP is a key step forward for customers that want to use both companies’ products, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc. He said the additional flexible options for deploying SAP’s HANA in-memory databases to Azure would be a cost saving factor for many enterprises that are looking to move next-generation apps to the public cloud.

“Overall, the SAP portfolio is to run on public cloud platforms is starting to look less like a Swiss cheese, with more and more infrastructure-as-service platforms being supported,” Mueller said. “This gives enterprises more choice, and fulfills one of their key requirements which is multi-cloud support for the SAP Cloud Platform.”

In other news, SAP announced a new suite of applications called SAP C/4HANA, which is a new customer relationship management offering that’s built on its recent acquisitions of Hybris, Gigya and Callidus Cloud, and covers consumer data, commerce, customer services, marketing and sales.

In his keynote at Sapphire Now, SAP Chief Executive officer Bill McDermott (pictured) said SAP C/4-HANA was built in order to revamp older CRM systems that are focused primarily on sales.

“SAP C/4HANA is all about the consumer,” McDermott said. “We recognize that every part of a business needs to be focused on a single view of the consumer. When you connect all SAP applications together in an intelligent cloud suite, the demand chain directly fuels the behaviors of the supply chain.”

SAP also launched the new SAP HANA Data Management Suite, which encompasses a raft of existing products including SAP HANA, SAP Data Hub, SAP Cloud Platform, Big Data Services and SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer. The suite, designed to integrate data in managed and federated environments, comes with support for Intel’s newly announced Optane DC persistent memory based on its 3-DXpoint technology.

Image: SAP