Continuing on the momentum to drive business innovation in cloud for enterprises across the globe, Microsoft and SAP have expanded their global partnership to the organizations in Sri Lanka. The companies will together premier solutions and provide joint support services ensuring a clear road map to the best cloud experience for businesses in the country.

Microsoft and SAP first announced their partnership in 2017 to help enterprise customers conduct business innovation in the cloud. The goal of the integrated offerings was to provide enterprise customers with a clear road map to confidently drive more business innovation in the cloud. The new deal extends the companies’ partnership in Sri Lanka and aims to help partners and customers deliver solutions that improve business productivity through SAP on Azure.

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud — SAP’s private managed cloud service — on Microsoft Azure allows customers to run SAP S/4HANA in a secure Microsoft Azure environment. This enables businesses to take advantage of the security, reliability and scalability provided by the companies’ and offered by cloud.

“This partnership with SAP allows us to harness each other’s products to empower our enterprise customers to run their most mission-critical applications and workloads with SAP on Azure,” said Hasitha Abeywardena, Country Manager, Microsoft Sri Lanka & Maldives. “We are truly excited to bring this technology to Sri Lanka and work with integration partners like John Keells IT to provide robust, innovative, scalable and flexible SAP platform services based on the best and most secure cloud technology.

“The expansion of our partnership with Microsoft in Sri Lanka is another step forward towards our commitment of helping our customers walk the path of digital transformation and become an intelligent enterprise.” said Sajith Simon, Sales Head, South India & Sri Lanka, SAP India Subcontinent SAP. “With SAP on Azure, businesses in Sri Lanka will get the best of both worlds, leveraging it to create a roadmap for their digital transformation journey and become best-run businesses.”

Last week, the duo welcomed over 50 ICT professionals to “Cloud Innovation Day – SAP on Azure” at the Shangri-La Hotel, Colombo. The event featured some of the best minds in the industry—including global ICT leaders, industry experts, and ecosystem partners—discussing SAP on Azure to evolve business processes and innovate for the future.

At the event, Hiranya Perera, General Manager of Information Technology at Hemas Holdings PLC, explained how the platform was helping the organization reduce maintenance costs, enjoy faster report generation, gain contextual awareness, and democratize data access. He also noted that for such organizations to scale more efficiently, they would need an enterprise-trusted cloud that was flexible, secure, cost-effective and met the performance demands of their SAP systems.

Luka Debeljak, Sales Lead for SAP on Azure at Microsoft Asia Pacific, cited the performance and on-demand availability benefits after deploying SAP S/4HANA on Azure. According to Luka, Azure provided John Keells Holdings PLC with the computing power to run their SAP applications, including HANA and S/4 workloads, smoothly.

John Keells Holdings PLC first deployed SAP S/4HANA on Azure in 2017, laying the foundation for the rest of its SAP workload to be moved to the cloud. The move allowed the organization to scale in a more cost-effective, flexible manner and adjust to their specific business needs with a secure and reliable enterprise-grade platform. SAP on Azure Strategic Partner, John Keells IT, helped the conglomerate with the migration.

Ramesh Shanmuganathan, Executive Vice President and Group CIO, John Keells Holdings PLC, explained how Azure's pay-as-you-go service allowed the organization to scale up as necessary boosting overall productivity and accelerating time to market. He also noted how the Microsoft and SAP partnership improved the technical architecture and cloud strategy of John Keells IT. 

There was also a panel discussion, moderated by Microsoft’s Cloud & AI Business Group Lead Sanjay Satheesh, which highlighted some of the best practices and strategies for migrating SAP systems to Microsoft Azure.