IBM and SAP have extended their long-standing partnership as IBM undertakes ‘one of the world’s largest corporate transformation projects’ based on SAP ERP software, designed to fuel the company’s growth and better support its clients.
As part of the expanded partnership, IBM is migrating to SAP S/4HANA to perform work across more than 120 countries, 1000 legal entities and numerous IBM businesses, supporting software, hardware, consulting and finance.
The project is focused on improving business processes with RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, premium supplier option with IBM Consulting, and will ultimately move more than 375 TB of data to IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud.
Driven by the need to modernize processes and deliver better insights to support clients running in the cloud, RISE with SAP is helping IBM centralize and standardize data worldwide. With access to the SAP HANA database, data can be accessed in real time and shared more efficiently among business units and teams.
The expanded partnership will also help with improved decision-making supported by AI and automated workflows. Once the transformation is completed, nearly all of IBM’s $58bn in revenue will flow through SAP software.
IBM Consulting has more than 38,000 highly trained SAP consultants and is leading the transformation providing the advisory, implementation, security, industry and technical expertise required to move the systems and applications to a digital environment.
This business transformation will eventually move more than 300 SAP instances and consolidate 500 servers with the RISE with SAP solution on IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud. The migration to SAP S/4HANA is already in progress across the company’s software business unit, with the initial deployment focused on IBM’s software-as-a-service and billing system.
For clients running on RISE with SAP on IBM Cloud, an expansion of the premium supplier option will provide an additional choice to run workloads on IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud.
Christian Klein, CEO and member of the SAP executive board, said: “This expanded partnership will enable IBM to accelerate its business transformation in the cloud and fuel its future growth. As a result, 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 benefitting from the full value of RISE with SAP.”
Arvind Krishna, IBM chairman and CEO, said: “Enterprise clients are seeking increased choice and control as they modernize their mission-critical workloads. Enabled by RISE with SAP, this is a milestone business transformation initiative for both companies due to 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.”
