SAP Africa and Microsoft renewed their global commitment to supporting companies’ move to the cloud at an event held in Johannesburg.

SAP and Microsoft have partnered to deliver RISE with SAP to customers across multiple global markets, including Africa. RISE with SAP is a complete offering of ERP software, industry best-practices and outcome-driven services designed to help companies migrate their core SAP ERP to the cloud, utilising the cloud hosting capabilities of hyper-scalers such as Microsoft.

Kholiwe Makhohliso, Managing Director for Southern Africa at SAP, called on companies to embrace the full potential of what cloud technologies can offer. “It isn’t simply a question of migrating to new technology for the technology’s sake. It’s about increased efficiencies, greater simplicity and less complexity. By leveraging RISE with SAP, companies of all shapes and sizes can take full advantage of business-transformation-as-a-service to power their digital transformation and innovation efforts.”

Colin Erasmus, Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft South Africa, said: “Microsoft strives to deliver the best cloud experience for customers. With RISE with SAP hosted on Microsoft Azure, companies can access SAP’s market-leading enterprise software in Microsoft’s industry-leading cloud to accelerate innovation and rapidly scale into new markets and capabilities.”

Accelerating business innovation in the cloud

RISE with SAP on the Microsoft Cloud is a comprehensive solution designed to advance business innovation and optimisation at speed and with minimal risk. It takes the guesswork out of enterprise planning and presents an accelerated migration path to cloud-based ERP software such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

The SAP and Microsoft partnership builds on a 30-year history of collaboration and co-innovation. “Together we empower organisations to run intelligent and frictionless enterprises in the cloud, with easy integration, a wealth of advanced services, and high levels of security and compliance,” said Makhohliso. “This combines to give companies an accelerated path to business transformation that can drive optimisation and growth throughout the business.”

Growing global customer base

Since its launch in 2022, more than 3 000 companies globally have leveraged RISE with SAP to move their ERP to the cloud, including Microsoft, Standard Bank, and Standard Chartered.

According to Vanessa Padiachee, Group CIO for Corporate Function at Standard Bank, “Establishing trust with partners is essential to a long standing and productive relationship.  Both our relationship and business investment with SAP and Microsoft was important to our migration strategy decision. It made sense for Standard Bank Finance to continue its relationship with SAP, due to our historical investment with the SAP Finance technology – and given that we already had a strong product stack in place. Similarly, when it came to Microsoft, some of our workloads were already running on Microsoft Azure – so partnering with both SAP & Microsoft in our Cloud journey made complete business sense.”

Makhohliso added: “Our partnership with Microsoft is a mission-critical aspect of RISE with SAP and has been driven by the most senior leadership in our respective organisations. I look forward to building on the strong foundations of our partnership to accelerate innovation and digital transformation for companies throughout Southern Africa.”