The Silicon Review ^Asia

China’s Alibaba Group and software company SAP has made a partnership where SAP will offer two of its flagship products in China. The partnership was announced at Alibaba’s cloud summit this week.

The deal will help companies to run their business processes in an IaaS model (infrastructure-as- a service).  SAP’s cloud will assist the cloud customers of Alibaba in expanding their current business solution, create fresh applications, and connect third-party technologies. 

SAP’s two products are business suite 4 SAP HANA (S/4HANA) and its cloud platform. The difference between S/4HANA and the cloud platform is that S/4HANA is developed on SAP’s popular database while the cloud platform is PaaS (Platform-as-a-service). This PaaS will provide enterprise application platform and an in-memory database.

As per the deal, Alibaba will adopt S/4HANA to run their business models and SAP will continue to utilize Alibaba’s cloud technology. There are many other areas like IoT, AI, manufacturing and digital marketing where both the companies will explore.

According to Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba Group, the company is very pleased with the partnership. Alibaba has formed a close partnership with SAP in the past, and it is exciting for the company to expand the partnership.

“What this will do is create a growth revolution for companies here in China and around the world because the ability to expand will be so much greater. And the massive simplicity and the ease of consumption and the beautiful experience will be unbelievable,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP.