IBM Migrating to SAP Cloud ERP

ARMONK, N.Y. and WALLDORF, Germany — IBM and SAP are expanding their partnership for IBM to undergo a corporate transformation project to help it “centralize and standardize data worldwide.”

As part of the partnership, IBM is migrating to SAP S/4HANA Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, according to the companies last month.

The transformation is intended to improve IBM business processes with RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud — private edition, premium supplier option with IBM Consulting.

The migration will help IBM perform work across more than 120 countries, 1,000 legal entities, and numerous IBM businesses, supporting software, hardware, consulting, and finance. 

The project will move more than 375 TB of data to IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud. 

IBM plans to eventually move more than 300 SAP instances and consolidate 500 servers with the RISE with SAP solution on IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud. 

IBM Consulting, with thousands of trained SAP consultants, is leading the transformation, an example of the companies combining their technology and consulting expertise to embrace a hybrid cloud approach and move mission-critical SAP software workloads to the cloud.

“This expanded partnership will enable IBM to accelerate its business transformation in the cloud and fuel its future growth,” said Christian Klein, CEO, SAP. 

“As a result, IBM will be positioned to provide the highest value of support and flexibility to its clients.”

The project is a “milestone business transformation initiative for both companies due to its complexity and scale,” said Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO, IBM.

Krishna said with IBM’s experience using RISE with SAP internally, the company will be “even better prepared to support our clients on their hybrid cloud and business transformation journeys.”