Tech giants IBM and SAP are set to make significant investments to help clients in their digital transformation programs.
As part of the partnership, the companies will combine complementary technologies including IBM Cognitive, Cloud and Power Systems with SAP S/4HANA and SAP HANA Cloud Platform, which will help companies in their digital transformation.
The companies intend to co-innovate solutions aimed at improving customer value through cognitive extensions, enhanced customer and user experiences and industry-specific functionality available on-premise and in the cloud.
IBM Global Business Services senior vice president Bridget van Kralingen said: "The future of business strategy and business value will proceed from the foundational elements of this announcement — cognitive, cloud and the design of consumer-quality experiences in every industry.
"We’re formalising a complementary set of capabilities to simplify and speed outcomes for clients evolving to become cognitive enterprises."
The technology majors plan to share their resources in Walldorf, Germany and Palo Alto, California, strengthening their long-standing partnership.
Both companies will also showcase new solutions and thought leadership to clients in IBM, SAP innovation centres around the world.
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SAP member of the executive board of SAP SE and president of global customer operations Rob Enslin said: "Today’s announcement builds on SAP’s commitment to enable strong, growing businesses that can seize the amazing opportunities of the digital economy.
"SAP S/4HANA is the reimagined suite of core business applications that has once again set the standard for the industry. I’m delighted that IBM and SAP will collaborate closely to give customers a clear roadmap to innovating new business models and outcomes that were never before possible."
IBM and SAP plan to provide a range of offerings for the clients who shift to new business models to seize emerging market opportunities.
The companies will deepen the strategic partnership to scale the IBM cloud platform to enable clients to meet unpredictable demands that arise during their digital transformation processes.
Both the companies will work together on industry-specific cloud solutions, besides expanding SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud services to include ongoing application maintenance and support services.
The services to be provided by the firms include client engagements for hybrid and on-premise offerings with SAP HANA on IBM Power systems. The offerings will be supported through the new IBM power systems center of excellence for SAP HANA in Austin, Texas.
IBM will enable business professionals to take informed decisions by developing cognitive solutions for SAP S/4HANA that use IBM’s cognitive application programming interfaces (APIs).
The companies will work together on pre-designed experiences that can be further customized for clients’ customers and employees The collaboration will also use IBM’s iOS design skills to improve mobile user experiences.
IBM’s Institute for Business Value and SAP’s Value Engineering organisation will collaborate on preparing digital transformation road maps by industry and by C-suite role.
Separately, IBM announced a collaboration with the University of Michigan to develop "data-centric" supercomputing systems that accelerate scientific discoveries in various fields.
The system will allow a real-time interaction between high performance computing applications for physics and big data, enabling the scientists to make improved quantitative predictions.
IBM’s high performance computing and data analytics vice president Sumit Gupta said: "Scientific research is now at the crossroads of big data and high performance computing.
"The explosion of data requires systems and infrastructures based on POWER8 plus accelerators that can both stream and manage the data and quickly synthesize and make sense of data to enable faster insights."
