The SAP SAPPHIRE NOW Expo Floor Featuring VMware, Cisco, HPE
The channel’s favorite providers are giving one snazzy show in Orlando this week.
![SAP Expo Hall Floor 2019 SAP Expo Hall Floor 2019](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt00025647d342f806/65245b8f55497e62d15f6831/SAP-Expo-Hall-Floor-2019.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
VMware and SAP have a strong relationship, touting the VMware platform as a perfect delivery system for SAP applications. SAP’s App Center is a big focus at this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW. Last fall, SAP certified the Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure appliances, powered by VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN software, for SAP HANA production environments.
Nutanix is a global SAP technology partner and the two have been collaborating for years on solutions and validation for running SAP software on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. The SAP App Center is again a highlight here, since Nutanix solutions natively converge compute, virtualization and storage into a software-defined solution that delivers applications at scale.
CenturyLink is spending its SAPPHIRE NOW capital detailing how SAP clients can leverage AI (artificial intelligence) to help drive digital transformation initiatives. As we’ve reported in our sister site, Channel Partners, CenturyLink recently aligned all of its partner types under one agreement, with enhancements to address what the company calls the “evolution of the indirect sales channel.” (Read: Cloud applications are changing everything.) Their spiel this year revolves around advanced and emerging tech solutions for partners managing complex and analytics-rich environments.
Last month, SUSE announced it was making the first enterprise Linux image for SAP HANA Large Instances available on Microsoft Azure. Unsurprisingly, one of SUSE’s main messages this year is their work with Microsoft and their joint partner community to deliver enterprise-grade solutions that help partners create, deploy and manage workloads, using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications as the underlying operating system to provide a platform that is validated on Azure Large Instances.
At Cisco’s booth, it’s all about how Cisco and SAP work together to deliver multicloud, multisite-ready solutions for the SAP landscape. Cisco UCS and Cisco HyperFlex (which is now certified for SAP HANA deployments) servers treat infrastructure as code and use policies to dynamically define how the Intel Optane DC persistent memory is effectively leveraged with SAP solutions.
A partnership between Google Cloud and SAP makes sense. Both have large, avid and loyal partner bases, and there’s bound to be overlap. Google’s cloud-native architecture gives deployments more agility, and there are a ton of synergies between each company’s app marketplaces. SAP plans for SAP S/4HANA Cloud to run on Google Cloud Platform as soon as the third quarter of this year, with plans to expand to China’s giant public cloud services provider, Alibaba Cloud. Look for similar announcements for Azure and AWS next year.
Last month, Lenovo announced a series of upgrades to its ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile data center infrastructure portfolios, aligned with Intel’s launch of the 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and billed it as the ideal solution for SAP HANA environments. At SAPPHIRE NOW, there’s talk about Lenovo’s persistent memory letting mission-critical applications like SAP HANA deliver much faster recovery of the data from an outage.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is emphasizing its ability to enable partners to replace existing databases, implement servers built for in-memory computing and transition without disruption when migrating to SAP HANA. It says nearly 46% of SAP licenses tie to HPE servers and that they are No. 1 in SAP HANA server deployments.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is emphasizing its ability to enable partners to replace existing databases, implement servers built for in-memory computing and transition without disruption when migrating to SAP HANA. It says nearly 46% of SAP licenses tie to HPE servers and that they are No. 1 in SAP HANA server deployments.
Channel Futures is in Orlando this week, where the air is hot — and so is the show floor.
SAP’s annual SAPPHIRE NOW conference is, as always, a glitzy and crowded event, and some of the channel’s biggest providers are wowing attendees with fancy tech, slick sales pitches and endless tureens of coffee.
So who’s doing what at the event? Click through the slides above to find out.
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