Microsoft Corporation (MSFT), SAP Expand Partnership

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Microsoft and SAP AG (ADR) (NYSE:SAP) officially announced plans to bring SAP apps to Azure Cloud service. The two companies will also collaborate on Business Objects and Microsoft Office for mobile support.

Support for applications to start in late June

By the end of next month, SAP Business Suite applications and Business All-in-One will be available on Azure Cloud. The partnership also includes elastic deployment of the SAP Cloud Appliance Library tool which offers a wide variety of virtual application configurations.

Takeshi Nuomoto (vice president of cloud enterprise for Microsoft) explained, “Customers can deploy these applications into Azure knowing that the configurations are tested, certified, and supported by SAP. They can take advantage of the flexibility and agility that cloud computing provides where you can spool up and down resources as needed and only pay for what you use.”

Details on the licensing

The flexibility does not, however, apply to the software licensing side. Customers who already use SAP can bring existing software licenses to Azure Cloud, but these licenses must support peak workloads. Database service options will include Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (which was formerly known as Sybase ASE). SAP has yet to certify Sybase SQL Server 2014, which is not all that surprising as it was released just last month.

SAP’s senior vice president and head of business development Kevin Ichhpurani offered more detail, “This relationship around Azure is a stepping stone to many more solutions to come, and this is just the first wave.” He also added a hint that SAP’s Hana would eventually offer support for product deployments on Azure, but he didn’t offer any insight as to when we can expect it.

Hana, SAP AG (ADR) (NYSE:SAP)’s in memory database, is scheduled to be released later this summer.

For now, Microsoft and SAP AG (ADR) (NYSE:SAP) aren’t very clear on when the apps will be available for SQL Server 2014. That upgrade wouldn’t be an in-memory database, but it would offer in-memory OLTP option for users to run specific indexes to speed up data-intensive apps.

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