Business leaders around the world are looking for solutions to maximize the value from their move to the cloud. According to SAPinsider research, the top driver for organizations updating their ERP systems is the need to improve business processes and maximize efficiency. Through its partnership with SAP, Microsoft has established itself as a premier cloud provider for SAP ERP deployments. SAPinsider spoke with Edward Yee, Director of Microsoft Canada’s SAP on Azure Business, and Doug Smith, Product Lead for the Cloud Services Business at Microsoft Canada to learn more about how Microsoft is working in tandem with the RISE with SAP offering to maximize the power of the cloud. Edward Yee: The world has changed dramatically in the last few years, and many of our clients are looking to increase their pace of transformation. To help navigate market uncertainty and accelerate their growth in cost savings and gaining efficiency, Microsoft is helping lead that transformation through our cloud investments. RISE with SAP is a transformation capability that is being offered to organizations today. Through our partnership with SAP, we help provide our clients with the capability to accelerate that transformation. Moving to the cloud allows clients to look at not just Infrastructure-as-a-Platform, but cloud as a platform for innovation through SAP and SAP's capabilities, while also leveraging the power of the cloud through our data and AI platform, through our Office and Microsoft 365 platform, business process automation with Power Apps, and the power of the Microsoft Cloud to enable that transformation. Doug Smith: We talk a lot about this “better together” tagline that Microsoft and SAP use. We believe it. Customers are on this transformational journey, and in parallel, they are on a journey with the SAP solutions; where we combine forces with SAP, we provide a significant value proposition for those customers, as represented in the transformation journey of Atos, the NBA, and GWC to name a few. Our joint SAP and Microsoft customers have significant macroeconomic pressures today. Microsoft enables customers to Do More with Less by combining the work that goes into SAP Solutions Migration with the organization's cloud transformation effort to reveal the true transformation force of enterprise-grade cloud. An SAPinsider survey found that Microsoft Azure is the preferred platform for those looking to deploy SAP S/4HANA in a public cloud environment by a margin of more than two to one. Smith and Yee highlighted some of the differentiating factors that Microsoft Azure offers. Edward Yee: Microsoft is much more than a cloud infrastructure service provider. When clients look at the traditional on-premise versus cloud, they wonder, “Am I just moving from one place to another, from infrastructure on-premise to infrastructure on the cloud, and that is it?” When you are on-premise, you cannot leverage some of these capabilities and services. For example, if you deploy SAP in a cloud, all of a sudden you have the capability of use Azure Monitor for SAP solutions to monitor resources for SAP landscapes that run in Azure, leverage the Microsoft security portfolio including Microsoft Sentinel, a cloud native SIEM that can monitor SAP, and the Microsoft Azure data and analytics capabilities. You essentially infuse your SAP data with AI and can do many more interesting things with the data and derive new insights that you cannot do in a traditional on-premise deployment. You can streamline your business processes by leveraging the collaborative capabilities through Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to be able to improve processes and productivity—such as managing workflow and approvals within Teams as an interface acting on SAP data and leveraging the Microsoft Power Platform to be able to do business process automation in a low-code fashion. Doug Smith: RISE with SAP and the ERP S/4HANA on an Azure platform allows for quicker extension and more innovation. We have a co-engineering relationship that we have had for many years with SAP. They have people who are located in Redmond, Washington, at Microsoft’s corporate headquarters. We have folks located in Germany at SAP’s corporate headquarters, and our teams are spread out across several different innovation platforms. This is not just about using Microsoft Teams in an SAP customer environment; this is about integrating Teams into the workflow of how SAP S/4HANA works. This extends the capability that both Microsoft and SAP provide, and that does make a significant difference to customers. Edward Yee: We are very thankful of our deep 25-plus-year relationship with SAP. This is a relationship that is much more than a marketing relationship. This is a true partnership that includes joint innovation, co-engineering, building solutions together, and solving problems together –it really is the power of our partnership, all of which benefits our clients. Nearly half of all users said the need to simplify management and operations impacted their decision to utilize RISE with SAP—the second-highest share next to only innovation capabilities. Yee and Smith discussed how Microsoft can help streamline workflows. Doug Smith: Approvals are a common workflow piece that anyone who works with an ERP system struggles with. SAP and Microsoft built the ability to bring SAP approvals to the infrastructure into Teams and Outlook, whether that is bringing it via an email in Outlook or in a Teams dialogue. The whole idea between this integration is that we are keeping the flow of work active as we carry the customer along that workflow journey. When you keep the customer in the flow of work, they do not have to exit systems in order to conduct a transaction. They can do it in their actual workflow process. Whether that is an Outlook, Microsoft 365 environment, a Teams environment, or a portal that they have created themselves, there is a tight connection around approvals. The recent SAPinsider research report, RISE with SAP Innovation and Hyperscalers, found that the desire for innovation capabilities was the primary reason that RISE with SAP users opted for the solution. Yee and Smith shared how pairing RISE with SAP with Microsoft Azure optimizes best practices across all industries. Edward Yee: Every enterprise needs to develop new business models to avoid being disrupted, gain efficiencies, and fund innovation. One of the foundational reasons why clients are moving to RISE with SAP is for that ability to digitally transform. RISE with SAP provides industry best practices for subscribers on how to use analytics and drive business process transformation through the joint power of RISE with SAP on the Microsoft Azure cloud. Doug Smith: Industry best practices are something that we are starting to see every customer ask for. When you look at an SAP S/4HANA solution, there are very specific workflows that are unique to each industry. In regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, or government, there are very specific requirements that both SAP and Microsoft need to provide in order to help customers stay compliant. When it comes to cloud journeys, there is no substitute for experience. Smith and Yee shared how Microsoft’s own experience in this field provides a useful path to optimizing SAP S/4HANA. Doug Smith: There is no better first example of the implementation than Microsoft itself. We are one of SAP's largest customers, and we put a lot of emphasis on getting there first and bringing innovation to the market early. That allows us to identify challenges early, identify solutions to those challenges, and then bring best practices that all of our joint SAP and Microsoft customers can take advantage of. Microsoft has been running S/4HANA on Azure for a number of years now. The co-innovation that we build together, we implement first at Microsoft. This allows us Microsoft employees that are interfacing with the joint SAP and Microsoft customers to bring these insights directly to our customers. The need to innovate is one of the key drivers pushing adoption of RISE with SAP. Microsoft works in tandem with SAP to provide users with a wide array of solutions to fit the needs of any industry. Doug Smith: We have over 25 years of history with SAP, and I am not just describing legacy history here. I am talking about co-innovation between our organizations; co-marketing programs, joint integrated support for our customers, and a business partnership that has stood the test of time. There are no other platform and service providers that can speak to the depth, breadth, and length of relationship that we have. We are also set apart by our partner ecosystem. Microsoft has a partner ecosystem with over 400,000 partners—15,000 in Canada alone. We have partners that stretch across nearly all 195 different countries. That scale allows us to bring capabilities through our partner channel with SAP to market in any location or flavor that our customers desire. Different customers have different requirements and priorities. This is in no way a one size fits all. We are creating templates, programs, best practices, architectures, and models that have been proven to work in the industry, and then provide those to customers to create an experience in a unique environment, by leveraging the work of others. Both the SAP and the Microsoft rich partner ecosystems help us bring that unique support and capability to our customers’ unique business needs. Security is one of the top concerns that business leaders have when determining a cloud service provider. A 2022 SAPinsider survey found that 62% of decision-makers listed security as a deciding factor in their decision—the second-highest percentage behind only cost. Smith and Yee shared insights into Microsoft’s security strategies to ensure that users remain secure and compliant with all regulatory requirements. Doug Smith: Microsoft uses Active Directory, a consistent identity system across all Microsoft platforms. SAP is an avid and very successful consumer of our identity system. That allows us and SAP to align around this single sign-on capability. We have a tight integration of our multifactor platform authentication with SAP services. We are the only platform that has this, and this differentiates the SAP on Azure solution from other hyperscalers in market today. Edward Yee: We make a billion-dollar annual investment in security with 3,500 global cybersecurity experts that tracks security threats 24/7 across all Microsoft products around the world. Microsoft also provides capabilities to protect SAP specifically such as continuous threat monitoring for SAP in Microsoft Sentinel. We analyze 6.5 trillion signals daily on emerging threats, and we do that to protect our clients. While it is important that organizations have access to the best technological capabilities, it is also essential for them to build a successful support infrastructure around their cloud journey. Microsoft offers users access to its Enterprise Skills Initiative (ESI), encouraging users to quickly acclimate to the new aspects of a cloud environment after moving from a traditional data center on-prem environment. Smith shared how Microsoft uses this skilling initiative to make cloud journeys run smoothly. Doug Smith: Managing a cloud environment has many similarities to managing a traditional data center on-prem environment, there are also significant differences, so we bring to bear an enterprise skilling initiative. We also provide both reactive and proactive support on solutions as customers move to the cloud. Many users have a concern with Microsoft and SAP being separate organizations, and ask, “how is the support experience going to be?” They do not want to be in a situation where we are pointing a finger at each other, or it being difficult to navigate support capability, or getting to the right person. As such, we put joint support programs together to make it seamless.