Historically, SAP's in-house team looked after its global IT real estate, supported by a variety of different technology companies, including Verizon. Due to the exponential growth of its cloud business, SAP decided to consolidate management of its global network environment, using next-generation network technologies, including software-defined networking, to build in resilience and scalability while freeing its own people to focus on customer-facing activities. Verizon was chosen due to the company's global reach, its expansive, secure and high capacity global network capabilities, and its technical expertise.
Moving its business to the cloud focused SAP's attention on its global network infrastructure. Critical for cloud-based applications is a high-capacity, highly-available and secure network platform essential to running a global SaaS business.
"Secure, resilient global connectivity is crucial for our future business success and critical to running our business," said Thomas Saueressig, Chief Information Officer and EVP of Global Cloud Infrastructure, SAP. "As we move more of our business to the cloud, our customers' success depends on our ability to connect them to our applications, and to help ensure those applications deliver the highest standards of performance and security."
Verizon now supports SAP in two key projects. First, Verizon is developing a new global network to link SAP offices around the globe, including data and voice services. Second, Verizon is providing highly-available, scalable and secure Internet connectivity to connect SAP's customer-facing data centers around the globe the platform that enables SAP's cloud business.