Q&A with IBM’s Mike Perera, Global Managing Director, SAP

Behind the News: RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server to Help Accelerate Transformation with SAP S/4HANA Cloud

IBM and SAP recently announced that RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server, a new SAP hyperscaler offering, will be available in second quarter of 2025 to support customers with their ERP transformation. This milestone is significant to IBM and SAP’s mission to help organizations speed up innovation, empower business users, and modernize their ERP environments to the cloud.

Here’s a look at why IBM’s Mike Perera, Global Managing Director, SAP, is excited about this news.

It’s critical that organizations move to the cloud to prepare themselves for the rapidly changing future. Success will depend on how quickly they can adapt to improve efficiency, make faster decisions, and embrace new innovations. More and more, businesses are ready to begin their SAP ERP transformation, and for more than 10,000 customers running SAP landscape on IBM Power servers, this solution is the fastest, easiest path to accelerate that journey.

In early customer projects, we’ve seen it help speed up the move to SAP S/4HANA from IBM Power on-premises to the cloud within just 90 days. The architectural consistency makes a 15-25% faster migration possible, because customers can shorten the time to provision and manage cloud, accelerate workload tuning, and reduce testing time. Quite simply: Faster migration means faster time to value.

This announcement creates significant opportunities for our business partners to support organizations of every size. SAP-certified partners can offer many advisory, application management, migration, and implementation services specific to this new offering to support customers’ SAP journey.

IBM also introduced a new investment program that supports partners and customers throughout the entire RISE with SAP process, from design to deployment to implementation. It’s a great way for systems integrators, partners, and customers to offset migration costs.

For customers and partners, we're launching the IBM Transformation Suite for SAP Applications in collaboration with long-standing IBM Business Partner SNP SE. The suite bundles software and services to help assess current environments, manage data migration, and automate testing.

Over the last few years, we’ve made great strides in our more than 50-year partnership with SAP. We have one of the largest SAP consulting practices that continues to grow and help customers move to RISE with SAP. Now, our subject matter experts, alongside systems integrators partners, are ready to help customers make the move to RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server.

From a technology perspective, IBM and SAP have partnered to position Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred operating system for net-new business for RISE with SAP deployments. More broadly, SAP’s Joule digital assistant is built with IBM watsonx, and we’ve made IBM Granite models available within the generative AI hub on SAP AI core on the SAP Business Technology Platform.

Looking ahead, IBM and SAP will continue pioneering business applications in classical and quantum computing, enabling joint customers to capitalize on timely AI to fuel business decisions that classical computing cannot support alone.

To learn more about how you can accelerate your SAP ERP transformation, click here.