John ‘JG’ Chirapurath Explains Why He Left Microsoft to Join SAP

… move to the cloud at their own pace. My favorite announcements from that is the fact that we’re making SAP HANA Cloud now available on Google Cloud. It runs on Azure, it runs on AWS, Alibaba. Now, it also runs on the Google Cloud. The same thing with our integration offering — it now runs on Google in addition to these other clouds.

CF: Can you provide context on what all your TechEd announcements mean to your partner ecosystem?

JC: SAP has always been a partner-first company. What this really means is, everything that is goodness for our customers is just as equally goodness for our partners. So free tier, they can utilize it. If you’re a partner and you want to essentially run through a couple of envisioning exercises, and what is possible with the platform, how you might extend an app, integrate it, maybe turn on some data analytics, you can effectively do that at no cost, walk into a customer site, use the free tier, and demonstrate all of that.

CF: Presumably, the new learning programming is also geared toward your partners?

JC: If you are a consulting organization and want to get your consultants skilled on BTP and SAP tools and technologies, you can send them to learning.sap.com and it’s completely free. It’s self-guided, you can learn. Whatever we’ve done, we don’t do it just with the customer in mind, though, the customer is our prime directive. Our partners and our partner community are just as important to us, and our ecosystem is vital to us. And we recognize that this is really a three-way partnership that allows us to help our customers with outcomes.

CF: Where are you seeing most of the opportunities for partners? Is it around enabling migration of legacy solutions or is its greenfield implementations?

JC: We see both. There are cases where our customers come to us who have SAP Business Warehouse sitting on premises and need to make sure that it runs in the cloud. In fact, one of those announcements at TechEd is Business Warehouse Bridge. If your SAP Business Warehouse runs or premises, you can adopt the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud using this bridge technology. The bridge understands exactly what sitting on premises, it understands exactly what the target environment is and helps you get there.