SAP has announced that it has partnered with the Alibaba Group to accelerate the company’s cloud transformation.
Speaking at SAP’s Sapphire conference in Madrid on May 27, CEO Christian Klein said the Alibaba Group will use his company’s private ERP cloud for its enterprise infrastructure, and the companies will cooperate on a joint go-to-market strategy. This deal will focus on the China market first, and enterprises doing business in China will now have access to SAP Integrated Business Planning, a cloud-based programme for sales and operations planning.
“We will offer Alibaba as a certified hyperscaler in China, for China,” said Klein. “China’s enterprises as well as multinational companies doing business in China, can move with RISE and GROW on the Alibaba cloud.”
We will offer Alibaba as a certified hyperscaler in China.
Christian Klein, CEO of SAP.
RISE is an SAP programme that helps companies with on-premises applications move to the cloud. GROW is the company’s offering to help companies implement its Business Suite, a set of applications to manage data and business processes in finance, sales, and HR, among other areas.
After China, the scheme will be rolled out to Alibaba customers in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Alibaba is a certified hyperscaler for SAP software workloads, and Chinese customers will be able to use Cloud ERP and Cloud ERP Private, a dedicated cloud environment.
AI integration
SAP said it was also considering integrating Alibaba’s large language model, Qwen, into its GenAI hub in China. This means that companies will gain access to localised GenAI capabilities within SAP applications. At the same time, SAP said it may deploy its AI Foundation, its AI toolkit for developers, on Alibaba Cloud so that customers in China can use its AI tools.
Alibaba launched its cloud regions in South Africa in partnership with BCX in October 2023. It has two availability zones in the country: one in Teraco's Isando campus, and the other at BCX's datacentre in Midrand.
At the launch, Reshal Seetahal, executive of the Alibaba business unit at BCX, told ITWeb that BCX would also be launching the Alibaba cloud service in Mozambique.
“We’re the last hyperscaler coming to South Africa, but we want to be the first into Africa,” he said.
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