SAP and Huawei: A Strong and Growing Partnership

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. In this article, we will examine SAP’s new messaging focused on Live Business, provide an overview of the SAP-Huawei relationship, discuss some of the many 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 organizations capable of competing in this 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 organization 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 is more than a new advertising slogan. 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.

The exciting aspect about this when talking of our partnership with Huawei, is that SAP’s vision of Live Business is very much in concert with Huawei’s vision of a Better Connected World. Together we are transforming organizations into digital businesses.

SAP and Huawei Working Together

Huawei is one of SAP’s global technology partners. Our strategic relationship has been successful and fruitful for both organizations 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.

The exciting aspect of this is SAP and Huawei are also 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, the 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 Center at the Huawei campus in Shenzhen. Some of the exciting key outcomes include:

Smart Metering solution (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) for the Utilities industry

Connected Vehicles solution using SAP Predictive Analytics

Customer Success

There are many excellent SAP-Huawei customer success stories. Here are three.

A leading 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 their vast amount of data in their fast-growing business

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

Optimized their enterprise business flow, giving an uplift in operational efficiency

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 e-commerce/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 optimized 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 omni-channel platform.

But it is not just big customers based in China. The SAP-Huawei relationship is 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. There is an excellent case study explaining their decision process and why they chose Huawei above all other solutions.

What impressed them was 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.

Huawei is a leading cloud solution provider, and especially strong in the telecommunications industry. 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.