SAP apps heading to Microsoft's Azure Cloud

Business Suite, All-in-One, Adaptive Server Enterprise and HANA all to be deployed by Q2

Microsoft and SAP have announced that a large proportion of SAP's software offerings will be deployed to Microsoft's Azure cloud by the end of 2014's second financial quarter.

SAP Business Suite, Business All-in-One, Adaptive Server enterprise database and in-memory computing platform HANA will all be certified and launched in the coming months.

The companies also announced that SAP's BusinessObjects business intelligence product will now function with Microsoft Power BI through the medium of Excel.

The arrangement can be seen as a strengthening of Microsoft and SAP's decade-long partnership, which has already seen SAP applications appear on SQL Server, as well as direct integration with Microsoft Office through plug-ins.

Microsoft and SAP are also planning to develop and market SAP mobile apps for Windows Phone, which will be manageable through Mobile Secure and Windows Intune - a boon for a Windows mobile ecosystem that needs all the extra enterprise pull it can get.

"Microsoft and SAP have a great history together, and we are committed to meeting the diverse needs of our enterprise customers," said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of cloud and enterprise.

"Our expanded partnership with SAP demonstrates our continued commitment to deliver the applications and services our customers need - in their private clouds, service provider clouds, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office."

At the same time as making the announcement, Microsoft also made public the fact it will not be inviting Amazon to its partners conference this year, placing it's cloud rival alongside Salesforce.com, VMware and Google on the blacklist.

SAP has been offering versions of many of its apps, including HANA, on Amazon's EC2 platform for some time.