Microsoft has teamed up with SAP to become the first global cloud provider to launch Project Embrace. The software company recently said at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2019 that it has been working with SAP on Project Embrace for more than a year now to deliver a joint roadmap with specific integrated reference architecture to run SAP S4/HANA on Microsoft Azure.

With this partnership, customers will benefit from prescriptive guidance that facilitates a move from their current on-premise production landscapes to a digital enterprise in the cloud.

As part of this effort, Microsoft and SAP are also said to be aligning their joint Partner Ecosystem. They have joined hands with the SAP Max Attention team to provide a more seamless customer support experience.

Project Embrace is SAP’s collaboration program with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and global strategic service partners (GSSPs) to simplify and accelerate a customer’s journey to the cloud. Through a combination of reference architectures, select service partners, and the power of the Microsoft Azure cloud, customers will be able to accelerate their digital transformation.

Embrace will help customers better manage refactoring and ongoing support costs, access the latest innovations, and improve the performance of SAP applications by leveraging Microsoft and SAP’s unified blueprint running S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure.