The company aims to move over 300 SAP instances and consolidate 500 servers with the RISE with SAP solution on IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud
An IBM office in Amsterdam. (Credit: Mark Ahsmann/Wikimedia Commons)
IBM is expanding its partnership with SAP by carrying out a corporate transformation project based on SAP ERP software with an objective to drive its growth and better support its clients.
As part of the extended partnership, IBM is shifting to SAP S/4HANA, the next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) software from SAP. The migration will help IBM conduct work across more than 120 countries, 1,000 legal entities, and various of its businesses that support software, hardware, consulting, and finance.
IBM’s corporate transformation project is focused on enhancing business processes with RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, premium supplier option with IBM Consulting.
The company plans to eventually shift over 375TB of data to IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud.
RISE with SAP is said to help IBM in centralising and standardising data globally, which will help the company modernise processes and provide improved insights to support clients running in the cloud.
By gaining access to the SAP HANA database, data can be obtained in real time and more efficiently shared among business divisions and teams, said IBM.
Furthermore, the expanded partnership with SAP will help IBM with improved decision-making supported by artificial intelligence (AI) as well as automated workflows.
SAP CEO and executive board member Christian Klein said: “This expanded partnership will enable IBM to accelerate its business transformation in the cloud and fuel its future growth.
“As a result, IBM will be positioned to provide the highest value of support and flexibility to its clients, allowing them to simplify and accelerate their business transformations while benefitting from the full value of RISE with SAP.”
IBM stated that the business transformation will ultimately migrate over 300 SAP instances and consolidate 500 servers with the RISE with SAP solution on IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud.
The shift to SAP S/4HANA is going on already across IBM’s software business division, with the initial deployment concentrated on the software-as-a-service and billing system.
IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said: “Enterprise clients are seeking increased choice and control as they modernise their mission-critical workloads. Enabled by RISE with SAP, this is a milestone business transformation initiative for both companies due to its complexity and scale.
“With this move, and IBM’s experience using RISE with SAP internally, we will be even better prepared to support our clients on their hybrid cloud and business transformation journeys.”