Microsoft, SAP Strengthen Ties With Mobile, Data, Cloud Partnership
Microsoft and SAP are two old-school enterprise vendors that have been partnering for almost 20 years, and this week their partnership is taking a pronounced leap into the future as they come together around cloud, mobile and big data products.
Context & Ripple Effects
This deepens an alliance that is itself nearly two decades old, but it lands at a specific moment in Microsoft's own arc: within the past week the company has pushed its cloud-and-mobile pivot through concrete moves — Office for iPad hitting tens of millions of downloads, the 'Mohoro' desktop-as-a-service preview, and Cordova tooling shown at TechEd. The SAP pact is the enterprise-software counterpart to that internal shift.
The breadth of pickup matters too: ZDNet, PC World, Gigaom, eWeek, BetaNews and others all ran the same-day story, which signals how closely the channel and enterprise buyers were watching whether the two vendors would move beyond reseller-style cooperation into joint product territory.
First-order effects
- SAP's large installed base gains a sanctioned path to run its business software against Microsoft's cloud and mobile stack, giving Azure exactly the mission-critical enterprise workloads it needs as a counterweight to rivals' infrastructure scale.
Second-order effects
- Competing application vendors now face pressure to formalize equivalent hyperscaler tie-ups rather than rely on generic platform availability, turning cloud-partnership exclusivity claims into a competitive weapon in enterprise deals.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the line between 'partner' and 'platform owner' keeps blurring: application specialists concede infrastructure economics to hyperscalers while retaining the customer relationship — a structural margin migration toward whoever owns the compute layer.
The trend: Legacy enterprise software vendors are repositioning around hyperscaler alliances, trading standalone-stack independence for distribution inside cloud ecosystems.