GCP – Stepping up business transformation with SAP RISE and Google Cloud

The global pandemic has accelerated the digital transformations of many businesses. For the tens of thousands of customers who run SAP, this has meant accelerating the migration of SAP workloads to the cloud as businesses seek greater agility, elasticity, uptime, and benefits from cutting edge cloud AI, ML, and analytics capabilities.

In that context, SAP’s announcement of the RISE with SAP initiative in January was timely. With RISE, SAP is recognizing that enterprises need both an easy path to the cloud, plus cloud providers and consulting partners who will help them achieve business objectives. We share this vision, and are aligned with SAP’s goals for RISE in several ways.

First, Google Cloud, SAP, and our consulting partners are committed to making it very simple for customers to move applications into the cloud, minimizing risk and cost and creating fast time-to-value. Technical services from RISE, as well as migration services from Google Cloud and our partners, help eliminate technical barriers to cloud migrations, and our Cloud Acceleration Program reduces up-front costs. The need to get into the cloud, quickly, was only increased by Covid-19. Companies like Southwire ran its entire SAP migration to Google Cloud during the pandemic, ensuring the company can access the latest systems and security protocols, and building a foundation for its future digital transformation efforts.

Once in the cloud, uptime and reliability then become absolutely critical. Google Cloud capabilities with Live Migration ensure that a customer’s SAP applications remain up and ru nning during infrastructure updates, enabling SAP and Google Cloud to perform maintenance without interruption. This was a key factor in Italian insurance company Sara Assicurazioni’s cloud strategy, as Live Migration has enabled the firm to have zero downtime for maintenance.

Second, Google Cloud and SAP share a commitment to helping customers digitally transform their businesses with RISE. Enterprises not only need to move workloads into the cloud as quickly as possible, they need solutions that will drive business value—fast. For a retail customer, this might mean combining and analyzing customer and inventory data from SAP with ad effectiveness data from Google Marketing Platform to optimize customer offers; for a manufacturer, it might mean leveraging AutoML Vision to improve manufacturing quality; for a bank, it might mean reducing the time it takes to review and approve loan applications. As an example, Google Cloud’s VM-based infrastructure enabled ATB Financial to quickly stand up support for the Canadian government’s emergency business lending program during Covid-19, getting money into customers’ accounts within hours.

Third, we are committed to helping customers extend the value of their SAP systems and data under RISE, with cloud AI, ML, and analytics. Beyond infrastructure, Google Cloud offers SAP customers the ability to connect business data to search, shopping, marketing, maps, and other Google data signals, creating more actionable insights and a competitive advantage. Leading skincare brand Rodan + Fields migrated its SAP suite, including supply chain, finance, and e-commerce to Google Cloud, achieving significant increases in agility and availability, as well as leveraging BigQuery for analytics. By combining behavioral and transactional data, Rodan + Fields can support more accurate marketing decisions, enhancing both its customer and consultant experiences.

SAP’s investments in RISE are another indication of customers’ movement toward the cloud, which helps yield lower TCO, stronger security and uptime, and new capabilities in areas like artificial intelligence or analytics. We’re committed to providing a smooth path to the cloud for SAP and RISE customers, and we continue to invest in infrastructure capabilities and services for them, including our recent announcement of 24TB of scaling with an associated world record SAP benchmark, helping customers minimize infrastructure costs while maximizing uptime, and supporting wholesale cloud migrations with our Cloud Acceleration Program for SAP.

Learn about Google Cloud capabilities for SAP in this ebook as well as the economic value we are driving for SAP customers. Visit our customer channel to hear their stories directly.