Standard Bank South Africa is moving its core SAP Cloud Platform services to Microsoft Azure in a move the bank says will have a significant effect on customer experience.
SAP and Microsoft entered into a partnership, called "Project Embrace", last year to move on-premise SAP ERP and SAP S/4Hana customers to the cloud. The tech giants have worked to offer clients jointly developed reference architectures, roadmaps, and industry best practices for a migration many enterprises are undertaking to reduce reliance on their own data centres.
Lillian Barnard, MD, Microsoft South Africa, says: "Project Embrace has three tenets at its heart: simplify, accelerate and innovate. By accelerating our customers' digital transformation journey, we are enabling them to become agile, efficient digital enterprises on Microsoft Azure - with a cloud platform optimised for SAP - leveraging best practice and specialist expertise."
For Standard Bank, the firms say the move will deliver a faster time-to-market on products and services, while ensuring its IT infrastructure is optimised. By moving workloads to the cloud, Standard Bank will be able to access a range of features that it can deploy instantly and scale according to demand, cutting costs and improving performance.
Sabelo Nkwanyana, CIO, personal and business banking, SA, Standard Bank, says: "Through Project Embrace, we are now able to better identify our business pain points and effectively address them through technologies that deliver a demonstratable return on investment."