Launch of joint SAP/IBM offering set for Q2 [Video]

Analyst describes announcement as very much a ‘sales and marketing play.’

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An announcement Tuesday by IBM and SAP detailing the upcoming release of an offering designed to move SAP S/4HANA workloads from IBM Power Systems on-premises to the cloud within 90 days has been described by an industry analyst as seeming “like a sales and marketing play more than anything.”

Scott Bickley, advisory practice lead at Info-Tech Research, said a press release  outlining the pending launch of RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server, scheduled for the second quarter of 2025, “touts 10,000 customers over 50 years running SAP on IBM. That provides no real information about how many customers currently run SAP on IBM, and SAP has 437,000 customers, so even if all 10,000 are running SAP on IBM, that is ~2%, which is not material.”

What it does, he said, is provide “another option for SAP customers who want …