Microsoft Corp. and software maker SAP announced Monday that they are extending their partnership to produce better mobile and cloud services.
Several of SAP's business applications will be certified for Microsoft Azure, according to PC Magazine. These apps include Business All-In-One solution, Mobile Platform, Business Suite software, Adaptive Service Enterprise and the developer edition of the HANA platform.
"This means customers will be able to get the mission-critical benefits of SAP software...on our enterprise-grade public cloud," Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of cloud and enterprise marketing at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.
The companies said SAP's Cloud Appliance Library will allow for preconfigured SAP software packages to be launched to Azure within only a few minutes, PCWorld reported.
Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, head of business development and strategic ecosystem at SAP, said that under the deal, Microsoft will help customers with problems at the infrastructure level while SAP will help with problems involving application errors. He added that if the source of the problem can't be found immediately, the two companies will work together to solve it.
The companies also promised that they will make Power BI connectivity more available to SAP BusinessObjects. They also promised "best-in-class" tools for data mining and an updated Gateway for Microsoft. The improved version is expected to be released by the end of the year, according to PC Magazine.
Numoto said industry-specific apps for retail and banking will be introduced, and will serve to connect SAP to the Microsoft Windows Phone system. Numoto also announced the introduction of the SAP Mobile Platform with SDKs for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1. These tools are expected to be available in 2015.
Ray Wang, analyst, chairman and founder of Constellation Research, said the deal is good news for SAP and Microsoft, PCWorld reported.
"This is SAP trying to show its cloud cred with a Microsoft partnership, and Microsoft trying to show enterprise cloud cred with SAP," he said.
Ichhpurani said the announcement will lead to Azure receiving more SAP software.
