Accenture to Provide SAP HANA as a Service on Top of HP Infrastructure

Accenture, SAP America and Hewlett Packard have partnered on a subscription-based offering of the SAP HANA platform. In addition to providing the in-memory computing platform as a service each company will offer managed services leveraging their respective capabilities.

The joint effort builds SAP CEO Bill McDermott's comments at the company's annual Sapphire Now conference in Orlando, Florida, where he acknowledged that the company's portfolio of offerings had become too complex, and that it would attempt to simplify things by consolidating offerings in enterprise cloud services. SAP HANA combines database, data processing and application platform, as well as tools for business analytics, all done in-memory, which gives it high performance.

The joint solution is aimed at clients that have already purchased SAP HANA but have not started their deployment or fully utilized their license capacity for it. It will include Accenture's managed and implementation services, HP's Converged System for SAP HANA, systems architecture and infrastructure services, and support services by SAP. The primary service provider will be Accenture, managing client relationships.

“With Accenture serving as the single point of contact, clients would find it easier to deploy and manage SAP HANA on HP infrastructure,” said Mark Willford, senior managing director for Accenture's Technology Ecosystem and Offerings division. “This joint initiative will be managed through the Accenture and SAP Business Solutions Group and provides another example of how we can simplify the process for clients to leverage SAP solutions and Accenture services.”

When talking about simplification in his keynote address earlier this week, McDermott focused primarily on SAP's own HANA cloud services, currently supported by 20 data centers around the world.