SAP has certified Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its business intelligence (BI) applications on the AWS cloud, enabling enterprises to gain more agility and infrastructure cost savings, as well as to standardise their use of public cloud.

Users will be able to deploy mission-critical SAP applications – including SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (SAP ERP), SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM), SAP Supply Chain Management (SAP SCM) and SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM) – on the certified Amazon EC2 instances in production environments.

Previously, experts have argued that CIOs are not confident about running mission-critical workloads such as ERP and CRM systems on public cloud, despite potential cost savings. The SAP certification is likely to instill confidence among enterprises to use AWS to run business-critical SAP apps.

Customers can run SAP workloads based on AWS's pay-per-use model and pay only for the resources used, thus saving on investment in underlying datacentre infrastructure, according to Amazon Web Services.

“As a predominately SAP shop, the ability to run SAP applications on AWS was very important for our enterprise application workloads,” said Theresa Miller, CIO and executive vice-president, information technology, at entertainment company Lionsgate. 

“We already use SAP in a Windows environment on AWS, and are pleased that we’ll be able to run SAP Business Suite on AWS for development, testing and production applications,” she said.

Enterprises will be able to license SAP applications to run in the AWS cloud computing environment from an authorised SAP reseller, or use their existing SAP software licences on Amazon EC2, with no additional SAP licence fees.

“This announcement provides enterprises the ability to use the cloud to flexibly deploy their largest and most sophisticated SAP applications quickly and scale up as the business grows,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice-president, ecosystem and channels, at SAP.

The SAP Business Suites certification comes after the two companies collaborated to test and verify the performance of the underlying AWS resources, as well as to compare it against the same standards that apply to servers and virtual platforms.

Previously, in October, SAP's Hana One platform was certified for production use and available on AWS Marketplace.