Alibaba Cloud have announced that they will be extending their global alliance with German company SAP in order to boost the growth of small-medium business in China. As per the terms of the deal, both companies will jointly go-to-market to offer SAP S/4HANA Cloud and deploy SAP’s cloud platform to help SMBs extend their business solutions.
According to Alibaba Cloud, Chinese SMBs understand the effectiveness of deploying their business applications in the cloud. They say that this segment is aggressive when it comes to reducing costs and reaching business goals faster by making the most out of their IT infrastructure.
By deepening their existing global relationship with SAP, Alibaba believe that they will help SMBs in China build new applications, extend current business solutions and integrate third-party technologies in the cloud. They also say that this alliance will benefit Chinese enterprise customers to quickly adapt to the evolving demands of the market.
Speaking about the alliance, Bill McDermott, CEO at SAP, commented:
China has been SAP’s second home for more than two decades Alibaba and SAP’s growing partnership expands our ability to empower digital China by building intelligent enterprises. SAP embraces the China Dream as we prepare for substantial expansion here in the years ahead.
SAP claim that the S/4HANA Cloud brings intelligence to an enterprise’s IT architecture with its AI-powered (Artificial Intelligence) automotive and predictive analytics prowess. They claim that by extending the alliance with Alibaba Cloud, SAP can build a huge brand presence across China and help enterprises build and deploy applications by leveraging the former’s IaaS capabilities.
Daniel Zhang, Chief Executive Officer at Alibaba Group, commented:
The availability of SAP’s globally renowned ERP system S/4HANA Cloud on Alibaba Cloud is yet another milestone in our globalisation strategy, and exemplary of our mission to make it easy to do business anywhere. We have formed a close collaboration with SAP in the past, and it is exciting for us to expand our partnership.
It looks like with this deal, Alibaba Cloud have taken yet another step in consolidating their position as a provider of cloud services in the Chinese market. It will be interesting to see the turn of events after this deal and the one with myDevices for IoT, where they will be providing a turn-key solution.