In this episode of CloudVersations, Oliver Wingrove, Head of Hyperscaler Strategy, SAP Asia Pacific Japan, in conversation with Karan Bajwa, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Google Cloud and Cathy Ward, Chief Operating Officer, SAP Asia Pacific Japan discusses how at a time when sustainability is the buzzword in business, Google Cloud and SAP help customers achieve their green line on top of their financial goals.
Asked about how SAP and Google Cloud are helping customers through their transformation journey in today’s fast-changing global environment, Karan said organisations could gain from the partnership in three ways. One, ushering in a seamless business transformation that allows them to deliver all of the benefits of a modern cloud native applications infrastructure without disrupting day-to-day operations. Two, benefiting from Google's advanced AI machine learning and analytics tools on immense SAP data to remove cost from the system. Finally, making businesses sustainable, by moving SAP applications to the Google Cloud, the cleanest cloud in the industry today. “This helps businesses to instantly reduce IT emissions, as well as achieve trackable and measurable sustainability goals,” added Karan.
Focusing on digital transformation in the Asia-Pacific Japan region, Cathy said it was the place to be. “We are the fastest growing region globally and 60% of the world's growth will come from this region over the next 10 years. There's a shift in the global economy's GDP, 40% by 2030. So, a big, big growth opportunity, which I think SAP working with Google Cloud can have a significant outcome for our customers. If we look at the macro level for Asia Pacific Japan, 160 billion of funding has come into this region from VCs alone in the last 12 months. Two or three of the world's largest most innovative countries in the world. And that influx of innovation is really driving the growth,” elaborated Cathy.
Beyond IT emissions, SAP and Google Cloud help customers in their climate change journey as well, said Karan. “Google has a very long track record on clean energy. Today Google Cloud is the only major cloud provider to purchase enough renewable energy to cover our entire operations. We will fully decarbonise our electric supply by 2030, which means that all our data centres will be supplied with carbon-free energy round the clock. By running SAP on Google Cloud, customers are able to move from carbon intensive environments, which are on-premise in most cases, to data centres, to carbon neutral infrastructure, helping them achieve their sustainability goals,” added Karan.
Asked about how SAP and Google Cloud are helping customers meet their growth ambitions in the volatile, post-pandemic world, Cathy said the idea was to ease customers’ journey to the cloud so that they have that agile, innovative platform to be able to respond to the disruption. “RISE is really all about providing business transformation as a service. It's a golden ticket, a concierge service to bring together products, services, and best practices on a scalable, flexible, secure hyper scalar system,” said Cathy. “With Google Cloud, the partnership allows our customers to take their business critical systems applications and put those systems into a secure future-proofed environment and run sustainable operations,” she added.
“As we provide services such as Drive, Search, Gmail, a lot of them have people's data. That posture extends into the enterprise workloads running on Google Cloud such as SAP. Google Cloud has security built-in, not bolted on. And that's a principle we adopt in our engineering. By default, at all times your data is protected through this encryption, not even Google can look into your data, and your data always remains your data and is private to your organization.”
Catch Oliver, Cathy and Karan as they discuss the numerous ways in which SAP and Google Cloud are helping customers realise their business goals.
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