SAP Offers Apps On GCP As Google Reveals Cloud Updates

Google and SAP have entered into a deal that will see SAP services delivered over the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google’s machine learning technology integrated in the German software giant’s applications.

The partnership covers SAP HANA on GCP, new G Suite integrations and data government collaboration, offering customers more scope and scalability to create new enterprise products.

Google + SAP

With SAP HANA certified on GCP, customers will be able to run their SAP applications and databases on GCP, such as SAP’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, which allows employees to access an application on any device.

In terms of machine learning, Google Cloud has APIs for speech, text, image, translation and infrastructure and Google and SAP intend to collaborate on intelligent applications, such as conversational apps that guide users through complex workflows.

The two companies will also drive greater integration across joint applications. For example, combining Gmail with SAP Cloud for Customer will enable users to link email conversations, search for duplicate contacts and create new tasks directly from Gmail. Other integrations include Calendar with Concur Tripit, Sheets with SAP BusinessObjects Cloud and SAP’s Digital Boardroom with Google Slides.

Finally, the partnership will aim to provide users with 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,” said Nan Boden, head of global technology partners for Google Cloud.

“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.”

In other news

The partnership was disclosed at Google Cloud Next 17, which is currently taking place in San Francisco. Here, Google has shared several updates around its cloud strategy and capabilities.

These include the launch of a Cloud Video Intelligence API, which uses powerful deep-learning models to enable developers to search and discover video content on media platforms like YouTube by providing information about entities inside video content.

Developers can search using nouns (e.g. ‘dog’ or ‘flower’) or verbs (e.g. ‘run’ or ‘swim’) and the API will provide contextual understanding of when those entities appear. A search for ‘tiger’ for example would find all shots containing tigers across a video collection in Google Cloud Storage.

“This API is for large media organizations and consumer technology companies, who want to build their media catalogs or find easy ways to manage crowd-sourced content, and for partners like Cantemo to build it into their own video management software,” Google says.

New capabilities have also been introduced into Google’s Cloud Vision API, improving its ability to classify and extract metadata from over 1 billion images. The API can now recognise millions of entities from Google’s Knowledge Graph and offers enhanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities that can extract text from scans of documents such as legal contracts or research papers.

Finally, Google Cloud is investing in its partner ecosystem. Partner program requirements have beem simplified and Google has introduced new ways to recognise partners with deep technical expertise, which include specialisations in app development, data analytics and machine learning.

There are also several new partner incentives, such as the provision of low-interest loans, the expansion of co-funding opportunities and a boosted rebates programme to include all Premier G Suite and Premier GCP Reselling Partners.

“Our partnering philosophy is driven by a set of principles that emphasize openness, innovation, fairness, transparency and shared success in the cloud market. Google’s commitment to this proposition has never been stronger, said Bertrand Yansouni, VP of global partner sales and strategic alliances for Google Cloud.

“We believe an ecosystem built on this foundation will help drive not only Google’s success and that of our partners, but help customers transform their businesses in the cloud and build what’s Next.”

Quiz: The world of cloud in 2016