Today, we’re announcing a strategic partnership with Nutanix to help remove friction from hybrid cloud deployments for enterprises. We often hear from our customers that they’re looking for solutions to deploy workloads on premises and in the public cloud.

Benefits of a hybrid cloud approach include the ability to run applications and services, either as connected or disconnected, across clouds. Many customers are adopting hybrid cloud strategies so that their developer teams can release software quickly and target the best cloud environment for their application. However, applications that span both infrastructures can introduce challenges. Examples include difficulty migrating workloads such as dev-testing that need portability and managing across different virtualization and infrastructure environments.

Instead of taking a single approach to these challenges, we prefer to collaborate with partners and meet customers where they are. We're working with Nutanix on several initiatives, including:

• Easing hybrid operations by automating provisioning and lifecycle management of applications across Nutanix and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using the Nutanix Calm solution. This provides a single control plane to enable workload management across a hybrid cloud environment.

• Bringing Nutanix Xi Cloud Services to GCP. This new hybrid cloud offering will let enterprise customers leverage services such as Disaster Recovery to effortlessly extend their on-premise datacenter environments into the cloud.

• Enabling Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS support for hybrid Kubernetes environments running Google Container Engine in the cloud and a Kubernetes cluster on Nutanix on-premises. Through this, customers will be able to deploy portable application blueprints that target both an on-premises Nutanix footprint as well as GCP.

In addition, we’re also collaborating on IoT edge computing use-cases. For example, customers training TensorFlow machine learning models in the cloud can run them on the edge on Nutanix and analyze the processed data on GCP.

We’re excited about this partnership as it addresses some of the key challenges faced by enterprises running hybrid clouds. Both Google and Nutanix are looking forward to making our products work together and to the experience we'll deliver together for our customers.

At Next ‘17, we announced a new partnership with SAP, focused on integrating our industry-leading cloud solutions with SAP enterprise applications. This week we’re at the SAP SAPPHIRE NOW event in Orlando to talk about the significant progress we’ve made over the last two months. We’re collaborating with SAP to create solutions that can help accelerate the digital transformation for enterprises by combining the power of SAP applications like SAP S/4HANA and the cutting-edge innovation available on Google Cloud in the following areas.

SAP on GCP

SAP NetWeaver-based applications are now certified on GCP

We’re announcing the certification of SAP NetWeaver technology platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which enables customers to run products like SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP Business Suite and SAP Business Warehouse, on GCP.

sovanta, a German technology company, is one of the first customers to run SAP S/4HANA on GCP infrastructure to help transform their operations, grow quickly and transition from on-premises to cloud.

Expanding the certification of SAP HANA on Google Cloud Platform  

We’ve completed the SAP HANA certification for 416GB GCP VMs and another certification for scale-out SAP HANA with four VMs, which enables enterprise customers with ever-growing volumes of business data to scale SAP applications on our cloud infrastructure.

Smyths Toys, one of the fastest growing toy retailers in the U.K. and Ireland, depends on the reliability and performance of Google Cloud to run their ecommerce platform powered by SAP Hybris.

"We chose Google Cloud for the price and performance of the infrastructure and the future-proofing we get with its innovative capabilities, including machine learning and data analytics services. The partnership with Google Cloud and SAP will help us further integrate our business systems and drive efficiency and value for our company," says Rob Wilson, the CTO of Smyths Toys.

Availability of SAP Analytics Cloud connector for BigQuery

With the addition of a native connector to BigQuery, it’s easier than ever for joint customers to discover, predict and share meaningful business insights across data in SAP systems and Google BigQuery.

Machine learning, data custodian and G Suite

Data custodian demos  

Google and SAP have collaborated on an innovative approach to address enterprise concerns around data protection and privacy while continuing to offer enterprises the flexibility and power of Google’s cloud platform. In the Google booth, at SAPPHIRE NOW, we have demos showcasing our vision around how enterprises can leverage SAP’s expertise and partnership with Google to gain significantly greater visibility into how their data is managed, accessed and protected on GCP.

Machine learning innovation

We’re working together with SAP to build intelligent applications combining SAP’s business process expertise with our machine learning services, such as Google Translate API, Speech APIs, Cloud ML Engine and the open source machine learning framework TensorFlow. To spur innovation, we’ve jointly announced an Intelligent App Challenge. The competition invites SAP and Google ecosystem partners to build applications using SAP HANA, express edition on GCP.

G Suite integrations

We’re continuing to implement our joint vision with SAP around future integrations with key SAP solutions in addition to existing integrations between G Suite and SAP solutions like SAP Anywhere, Concur and BusinessObjects Lumira.

For those attending SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW event, stop by the Google Cloud booth, #1153, for additional details and to see demos in action.

San Francisco — Today, we’re announcing a new strategic partnership with SAP, focused on developing and integrating Google’s best cloud and machine learning solutions with SAP enterprise applications. This partnership, which includes certification of the in-memory database SAP HANA on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), new G Suite integrations, Google’s machine learning capabilities, and data governance collaboration, offers Google Cloud, SAP and our customers more scope, scalability, and the exciting opportunity to create new products.

SAP has a long history at the center of business and technology. More than 345,000 customers worldwide, including 87% of the Forbes Global 2000, work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively with SAP’s broad suite of products. With this partnership we’re offering SAP customers the opportunity to leverage Google Cloud to accelerate their digital transformation and convert data into actionable insights and business outcomes.

SAP applications in the cloud

The SAP HANA database is now certified on GCP. This certification enables customers to run mission-critical SAP applications and databases like SAP HANA on GCP through ongoing certifications and integrations. One example of this work is the accelerated availability of certain performance enhancements to ensure that GCP delivers optimal performance for SAP HANA.

The partnership also represents the start of a close engineering collaboration between SAP and Google. Google Cloud is the first public cloud vendor to make SAP HANA express edition available to developers in an on-demand deployment model. Developers can now use SAP HANA express edition to build custom enterprise applications on GCP with the flexibility of on-demand, near instantaneous deployment leveraging Google Cloud Launcher. In addition, we are also working closely with SAP to make SAP Cloud Platform available on GCP.

The SAP Cloud Platform’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution now supports G Suite and GCP. The integration with Google allows customers to easily and securely connect SAP with Google’s productivity suite G Suite or GCP and give access to their users to any application from any device at any time.

Machine learning for the enterprise

Machine learning is top of mind for enterprise CIOs and developers alike, and Google is leading the industry to expand access to machine learning’s benefits. Google Cloud solutions include APIs covering speech, text, image, translation and infrastructure for large-scale training and delivery of machine learning capabilities. Google and SAP intend to collaborate on building machine learning features into intelligent applications like conversational apps that guide users through complex workflows and transactions. This is just one example of how the Google Cloud and SAP partnership will enable digital business transformation using the power of machine learning, with deeper technology integrations to come.

Integrations in productivity apps

Google Cloud and SAP will drive greater integration across joint applications. These integrations will enable seamless experiences such as the combination of Gmail with SAP Cloud for Customer, a CRM solution that allow users to link email conversations, search for duplicate contacts and creating new leads, opportunities, tasks and visits directly from Gmail. Other integrations include Calendar with Concur Tripit, and Sheets with SAP BusinessObjects Cloud. Colgate-Palmolive, a long-standing SAP customer, is already seeing the benefits of the combined strength of G Suite and SAP.

Colgate-Palmolive has a focused IT strategy that relies on a small number of strategic partners, including SAP and Google Cloud. Colgate chose to partner with SAP and Google Cloud because both are innovative and approach work collaboratively. They've been working with SAP for 23 years and moved all employees to G Suite suite in 2016 (about 28,000 people globally). The implementation took only six months and, after only three months, they’re already working differently, collaborating more easily.

Colgate gets tremendous value from the work they do with Google and SAP, individually. They’re excited about the numerous opportunities ahead given a tighter Google / SAP partnership. Examples include combining Google’s machine learning with SAP’s business process expertise as well as integrating SAP’s Digital Boardroom, a co-innovation between SAP and Colgate, with Google Slides.

Greater visibility and control

Enterprise customers moving from on-premise to public cloud environments wish to retain insight and control over the access to their sensitive data, while at the same time benefiting from the agility, scale and global presence of a public cloud platform. GCP provides a rich set of capabilities around access control, auditing and encryption key management to enable customers to defend against external attacks and manage insider access risk.

We're now working with SAP to develop a governance, risk management and compliance solution that provides visibility and control over how data is handled on GCP, including how administrative access is granted by the cloud provider. For customers desiring an independent entity overseeing the handling of their data on a public cloud, SAP plans to act as a data custodian for their data on Google Cloud Platform.

We look forward to all the ways we can bring the innovation, scale and reliability of Google Cloud to the already invaluable tools SAP provides to hundreds of thousands businesses around the world.