News

Microsoft and SAP Ink Cloud BI Partnership

• By Kurt Mackie
• May 19, 2014

Microsoft and SAP on Monday announced their plans to certify some SAP business solutions on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform this summer.

While Microsoft says the new product certifications are expected to happen by the end of June, there is one that is already in effect. The two companies announced on Monday the general availability of an interoperability solution that enables SAP's BusinessObjects BI Universes to function as a data source for Microsoft's Power BI for Office 365 business intelligence solution.

Other data sources enabled include the SAP Business Suite and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse solutions, which now can be searched via Microsoft's Power Query Excel add-on tool.

By the end of next month, Microsoft plans to certify the following SAP products on Microsoft Azure:

• SAP Business Suite
• SAP Business All-In-One
• SAP Mobile Platform
• SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise
• SAP HANA developer edition

The companies are also collaborating on the SAP Cloud Appliance Library tool to make it easy to deploy preconfigured SAP solutions to Microsoft Azure.

Collaboration is also happening on an improved SAP Gateway for Microsoft product, which is expected to become available by year's end. The new SAP Gateway for Microsoft product will add support for accessing SAP data through both Microsoft Azure and Office 365 solutions, according to the announcement.

Microsoft and SAP have also partnered on SAP mobile applications for the Windows platform. New software development kits for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows are currently under development. Previews of the SDKs will arrive before year's end; general availability is expected next year. It will be possible to use either Microsoft Windows Intune or SAP Mobile Secure to manage the new SAP mobile apps.