Lenovo, SAP join forces on cloud initiative in mainland China
Lenovo Group is looking to advance its data centre business in China through a major cloud computing initiative with Germany’s SAP, the world’s largest supplier of business management software.
The two companies are to jointly announce on Wednesday an agreement to deliver in the first half of this year a new cloud service for large Chinese companies on the mainland that use SAP’s Hana database technology.
The deal marks an extension of a strategic alliance formed between the two companies in January last year to help develop the worldwide market for Hana, which competes against US software giant Oracle’s more established database system.
Lenovo’s data centre group, which provides servers, storage, software and services, has largely been working with SAP to fine-tune hardware to specifically run Hana, as well as cooperating on joint marketing efforts.
Lenovo has an opportunity to increase its data centre business and change the market’s perception that it is mainly a PC company
Other global hardware suppliers with huge Hana-based deployments include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell Technologies, Cisco Systems and Huawei Technologies.