The New Microsoft and SAP Partnership Sounds a Little Familiar

It’s déjà vu all over again at SAP’s annual SAPPHIRE conference in Orlando this week as Microsoft (MSFT) and SAP (SAP) announce a new alliance that will allow the largest of HANA databases to run on the Microsoft Azure cloud.

The partnership will allow organizations to combine SAP HANA core applications and data analytics with Microsoft Azure’s enterprise cloud in development, test and production workloads. This provides big opportunities for channel companies that service customers in data-heavy industries such as retail, manufacturing and distribution, among others.

But wait! There’s more! The expanded partnership will allow Office 365 applications to integrate with SAP’s business software, beloved by Fortune 500 companies far and wide. That means that starting in the third quarter of this year, Outlook, Word and Excel can link to Concur, SuccessFactors, Ariba and Fieldglass

“At Microsoft, we are focused on empowering organizations to advance their digital transformations,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Together with SAP, we are bringing new levels of integrations between our products that provide businesses with enhanced collaboration tools, new insights from data and a hyper-scale cloud to grow and seize new opportunities ahead.”

This isn’t the first go-round for the two companies. Resellers and service providers may remember the ill-fated Project Mendocino, the 2006 alliance that allowed users to access data stored in SAP applications through the Microsoft Office suite. The project, later named Duet, didn’t manifest as the revolutionary partnership that changed the way enterprises conducted business that Microsoft and SAP thought it would.

Still, we have to admit that having your Outlook calendar link to your Concur travel platform, among other capabilities, sounds pretty sweet. If nothing else, the possibilities are a godsend to executive assistants everywhere.