June 2, 2021

The preferred status of Microsoft Azure for hosting S/4HANA seems to be coming to an end.

SAP, which has secured a deal with Microsoft to pair its ERP suite with Azure, will now encourage its customers to deploy S/4HANA wherever they want.

According to SAP, the companies’ Embrace partnership will now focus on customer choice.

SAP is also pushing for a new way to pay for its software, a subscription-based hosting offering called “Rise with SAP,” which will be in the spotlight at its Sapphire Now 2021 event for customers this month.

The Embrace project was launched in May 2019 to promote a reference architecture for partners who move their applications to the cloud via either Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure.

In October 2019, this became a partnership between SAP and Microsoft. Microsoft agreed to resell components of the SAP Cloud Platform together with Azure, and SAP chose Microsoft Azure as its cloud partner of choice.

The Azure sales part of the partnership expires on June 30, 2021.

SAP executives said the deal was one-sided in Microsoft’s favour.

While the SAP sales team told customers that Microsoft was their preferred partner, the Microsoft sales team tried to push their SAP colleagues out of the conversation, and it quickly turned into a turf war.

This gave Microsoft the opportunity to dismantle the non-core functionality that SAP had, such as CRM or HCM.

For more information, read the original story in CIO.