Atos has has expanded its collaboration with Microsoft to jointly address the fast-growing SAP HANA market, targeting the most demanding customers, many of whom are running mission-critical SAP workloads.

Atos and Microsoft intend to jointly support their respective largest customers and other prospective customers. The partners have built a joint team that will guide developments and go-to-market activities for their respective field organisations, with a common engagement model.

Atos will further invest in the Center of Excellence for the deployment of SAP solutions on Azure, and Microsoft will support Atos in expanding its SAP on Azure migration practice, including Migration Services and System Integration capabilities.

Atos will provide data and production migration on Azure across the SAP Intelligent Suite and the SAP Digital Platform and will further develop its differentiated SAP-based solutions to drive business transformation for enterprises.

On Microsoft Azure, Atos and Microsoft will be targeting the deployment of SAP HANA Very Large Instances (VLI) in Azure bare-metal or virtualised environments.

“Most of our customers have been defining their SAP cloud roadmaps, while also integrating the use of the most advanced business functionality provided by SAP”, said Adrian Gregory, senior executive vice president and executive sponsor for Microsoft at Atos.

“But only a very close relationship between a service provider and a hyperscale cloud provider may deliver the security and the full articulation that our largest customers require.

“We’re pleased to expand our collaboration with Atos”, added Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft Corp.

“We see an opportunity for Atos to be a driving force in bringing SAP customers an efficient and trusted roadmap to Microsoft Azure.”