The SAP-Huawei relationship goes from strength to strength.

Each year, our two companies work together to deliver greater value to customers of all sizes and in all industries around the world.

We'll look at SAP's new messaging focused on Live Business, provide an overview of the SAP-Huawei relationship, highlight some of the SAP-Huawei customer successes and brainstorm about the future of the SAP-Huawei relationship.

Live Business

Over the past five years, SAP has built strong solutions based on our revolutionary in-memory technology called SAP HANA.

Our aim is to enable our customers on their digital transformation roadmaps.

This means we are helping them transition from vulnerable traditional businesses into nimble organisations capable of competing in the fast-moving, digital economy.

SAP's vision of a Live Business is one that predicts the future instead of reporting the past.

It means an organisation with totally agile business processes — connecting every employee and asset to a single, intelligent digital core system — one that can anticipate, simulate, and innovate new opportunities on the fly.

What this means in practice is enabling businesses to rapidly respond to unexpected shifts in consumer demand, new competitive threats and other potentially disruptive events including things outside their normal span of focus, such as natural disasters that might affect their business.

With an innovative digital core like SAP S/4HANA, a business can be fully connected to its customers, suppliers, and employees.

Live Business represents SAP's vision of a seamless digital business that enables our customers to sense, respond, learn, adapt, and predict to create value in the moment.

SAP's vision of Live Business is in concert with Huawei's vision of a better-connected world.

SAP and Huawei working together

Huawei is one of SAP's global technology partners.

Our strategic relationship has been fruitful for both organisations and, most importantly, for our joint customers.

The SAP and Huawei partnership has brought about many innovative solutions with new hardware choices offering higher reliability and better price/performance.

SAP and Huawei are highly compatible and complementary to each other, with SAP as a provider of enterprise applications and Huawei as a provider of IT infrastructure.

Our end-to-end solutions focused on Industry 4.0, IoT, Big Data, and cloud computing, help accelerate our customers' digital transformation across multiple vertical industries.

A great example of this is that SAP and Huawei have established a Co-innovation Centre at the Huawei campus in Shenzhen.

Some of the exciting key outcomes include a smart metering solution (advanced metering infrastructure) for the utilities industry and connected vehicles solution using SAP predictive analytics.

Customer success stories

A Fortune 500 oil and gas company is running one of the world's largest data warehouses on SAP HANA and Huawei infrastructure.

They were looking for a strong solution provider to enable effective management of the large amount of data in their fast-growing business and high levels of system performance and scalability.

With SAP HANA, SAP Business Warehouse, and Huawei infrastructure, they successfully achieved a 4x to 6x improvement in their system performance and optimised their enterprise business flow, giving an uplift in operational efficiency, and enabled global business data sharing and consolidation, thereby accelerating business decision-making.

Another interesting customer is a China-based developer, distributor, and retailer of snack foods with 1,800 branded store locations.

At the core of their rollout is SAP CRM, SAP ERP, and the SAP Hybris eCommerce/multi-channel commercial solution all running on Huawei hardware.

The highly stable IT platform reduced operational risks, accelerated management reforms within the enterprise, and helped the chain improve its competitive strengths.

This helped them stay on track to achieve their 2018 sales target of 10 billion RMB.

With a highly integrated IT platform built on the results of the big data analysis of how customers expect to make their purchases and in which environments, they are able to provide an optimised shopping experience that will continue to improve as the tailored solution is adapted to fit future requirements.

On China's unofficial ‘Singles Day' on November 11, 2015, they processed 1.4 million eCommerce orders and handled over 10 million orders in total.

The Warehouse Management System (WMS) shipped 300,000 orders in a single day.

The SAP CRM system on Huawei hardware now serves 18 million customer members in the omnichannel platform.

The SAP-Huawei relationship is also growing rapidly in EMEA.

Another good example is a mid-sized UK company that manufactures and sells window and conservatory blinds.

They made the move to SAP HANA.

During the process, they conducted an intensive assessment of the hardware options on which to run it.

They were impressed by Huawei's approach to unlocking the business value from their SAP and technology investments.

They liked Huawei's approach of looking at the requirements not just from the view of a hardware manufacturer, but as a vendor that invested the time to truly understand what their business was trying to achieve.

The SAP-Huawei partnership

Huawei is a strong and complementary partner to SAP.

We are leveraging top talent from both companies for joint strategic initiatives in key areas.

We also perform benchmarks to achieve the best SAP-Huawei performance.

In addition to having a strong presence in the enterprise market across Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), Huawei is growing significantly in EMEA and Latin America.

We believe that together we are driving the market and accelerating the cloud innovation to better meet customers' business needs in these regions.

SAP and Huawei are delivering superior customer value and driving simplicity for IoT enablement through Huawei products and solutions certified for the SAP HANA and cloud platforms.

The IoT platform is especially suited for global companies, in the areas of smart manufacturing, predictive maintenance, and connected vehicles.

Huawei's SAP HANA Appliance solutions have achieved great success with large-scale applications in industries such as manufacturing, energy, retail, high-tech, and finance, across China, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and other regions.

The solutions have high reliability, great price/performance, and excellent scalability and therefore offer more choices to customers.

We are excited about the future of the SAP-Huawei relationship both for ourselves and more importantly for what it brings to our customers.

Article by Martijn Ras, SAP vice president and global alliance manager for Huawei