Google has formed a strategic partnership with software-enabled services provider Lemongrass, known for delivering excellent SAP on Cloud experience to enterprise customers.
The cloud era has underscored the immense need for modern businesses to accelerate their move to the cloud not only to remain agile and competitive but, most importantly, to succeed in today’s extremely volatile business environment. Tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, Cisco, SAP, Salesforce-Slack, and Atlassian recognised this megatrend and have recently created the new industry initiative Trusted Cloud Principles to ensure the free flow of data, to promote public safety, and to protect privacy and data security in the cloud. Moreover, Google and SAP have expanded their collaborative partnership by enabling RISE with SAP customers to execute business transformations and migrate critical business systems to the cloud leveraging Google Cloud’s services such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Further deepening Google’s capabilities in migrating SAP environments to the cloud, the company has recently allied with Lemongrass, a specialist in running SAP on hyperscale clouds. Atlanta-based Lemongrass offers a portfolio of services designed to deliver the desired outcomes from an SAP transformation and engineers strategies and services that enable the economics, scale, and agility of hyperscale computing without compromising data security. The consulting firm currently runs over 6,000 SAP servers and supports around 300,000 users across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.
Ensuring Seamless SAP on Cloud Experience
Joe Coyle, Chief Strategy and Alliances Officer at Lemongrass shared that the company saw the opportunity to go beyond its SAP on AWS expertise and take advantage of the growing demand for SAP on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in the hyperscaler market. He stated that the consulting company had been a “one-trick pony with SAP on AWS” and partnering with Google is the next logical step to expand the business. In March, Energy Queensland selected Lemongrass, which has an office in Melbourne as its APAC headquarters, to move dozens of SAP applications and an SAP S/4HANA database environment to an AWS Landing Zone.
“It became a no-brainer pretty quickly that in order to scale this business and not to miss the next rocket in the hyperscaler world that we were going to have to take our skills and port them over and innovate with SAP on GCP. We are going all-in now on GCP, not so much just doing SAP migrations, but we look at GCP as the ultimate innovation platform going forward,” Coyle detailed.
Under the partnership, Lemongrass will provide its standard SAP migration services leveraging GCP’s tools for data analytics, AI, and machine learning. Aside from the wealth of tools available in GCP, Coyle said that another major reason why SAP customers choose to move SAP workloads onto GCP is security– specifically, the closed-loop network and the security parameters in place.
Snehanshu Shah, Managing Director of SAP solution engineering at Google, stressed that the majority of SAP customers’ workloads are still sitting on-premises or in private clouds. Google partnered with Lemongrass primarily for its extensive experience in delivering SAP migrations. He shared:
“We looked at the expertise that Lemongrass brings for doing rapid zero-downtime migrations and helping customers run their SAP systems faster and better because this frees up customers to innovate. Customers are looking for a partner that knows SAP very well but also knows data very well. They want a single partner that understands SAP and can run SAP, but also understands how they can leverage GCP’s data, AI, and ML capabilities in SAP.”
Coyle stressed that though Lemongrass has also expanded to provide services for SAP on Azure, the company is keen on strengthening its focus on GCP.