Newsbyte: SAP Customers Gain New Choices for Heterogeneous Cloud Deployments; SAP and Partners Scale to Meet Fast-Growing Demand

WALLDORF, Germany, Jan. 22, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced plans to collaborate with leading cloud service providers to offer SAP-validated, cloud-based infrastructure and application services globally. The infrastructure and application services are intended to be designed to improve quality of service and lower total cost of ownership (TCO), include a common reference architecture and incorporate service-level agreements and data privacy standards that aim to ease deployment.

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According to IDC, cloud spending, including cloud services and the technology to enable these services, will surge by 25 percent in 2014, reaching over US$100 billion.* As part of the comprehensive SAP® Cloud portfolio of solutions, SAP already offers companies instant value and a simplified customer experience to deploy their SAP solutions with the SAP HANA® Enterprise Cloud service, which includes cloud infrastructure and managed services. Together with its ecosystem, SAP plans to meet the growing market demand and the unique needs of customers with heterogeneous application environments and mixed application infrastructure landscapes with a partner cloud powered by SAP HANA.

Initial plans are already in place with 12 world-class providers and SAP anticipates more to come. These first movers have global reach, with more than 412,000 servers in more than 580 datacenters around the world combined. They include: CenturyLink Technology Solutions, China Datacom, Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, Swisscom, Telstra, T-Systems, Verizon, Virtustream and VMware vCloud® Hybrid Service™.

"SAP really understands the importance of its ecosystem to its success," said Darren Bibby, program vice president, Channels and Alliances Research, IDC. "For example, it has been very effective at extending its reach with VARs and systems integrators for more traditional implementations. Now that the world is moving to cloud and hosted consumption models, SAP has the opportunity to transfer that same ecosystem prowess to outsourcing providers for the ultimate benefit of end users."

SAP laid out early ambitions for this space at SAPPHIRE® NOW in 2013 and is now evolving beyond best practices and enablement resources to a new level incorporating quality assurance and service-level standards.

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Media Contacts:
Jason Loesche, +1 (610) 661 8541, [email protected], EST
Tanja Charrier, +49 (6227) 7-48522, [email protected], CET

* "IDC Predictions 2014: Battles for Dominance — and Survival — on the 3rd Platform," December 2013, doc #244606
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SOURCE SAP AG