-- Expanded partnership improves cloud and data interoperability, delivers new mobile and productivity solutions.

REDMOND, Washington and WALLDORF, Germany, May 19, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: "MSFT") and SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) have expanded their global partnership to deliver new solutions that are intended to help improve employee productivity, enhance workforce mobility and drive increased business value for customers and partners.

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Monday's announcement aims to extend the companies' long-term partnership in three critical areas: enterprise cloud computing with business-critical SAP applications certification for Microsoft Azure; improved interoperability between data from SAP applications and Microsoft Office, including general availability of connectivity between SAP^® BusinessObjects™ business intelligence (BI) solutions and Microsoft's Power BI offering; and mobile productivity with expanded development and support for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1.

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

"This has been an exciting year for one of the leading strategic partnerships in our industry," said Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions, SAP. "For our customers, SAP and Microsoft are among the top strategic vendors relied upon to drive their business' success. We are proud of how we listened to our customers and together developed — and will continue to develop — innovative new programs focused on the cloud, mobility, analytics and interoperability that we expect will provide unparalleled value for our customers."

SAP applications on Microsoft Azure 
It is anticipated that by the end of Q2 2014, Microsoft and SAP will support SAP^® Business Suite software, SAP Business All-In-One solutions, SAP Mobile Platform, SAP Adaptive Server^® Enterprise (SAP ASE) and the developer edition of the SAP HANA^® platform on Azure. In addition, Microsoft and SAP expect that customers and developers will be able to deploy and provision a number of preconfigured SAP solutions, within minutes, directly to Azure using the SAP Cloud Appliance Library tool.

New and existing SAP customers will be able to take advantage of the "pay per use" model in Azure to reduce infrastructure costs and total cost of ownership. Customers will be able to take advantage of the compute resources in Azure to support SAP solutions and quickly scale capacity as computing requirements change, paying only for the resources used.

Improved data access and interoperability
Monday, Microsoft and SAP made Excel connectivity to SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions through Microsoft's Power BI offering generally available. Microsoft and SAP also announced plans to deepen interoperability between applications and platforms with a new version of the SAP Gateway for Microsoft, which is expected to help customers automate business processes and access SAP applications and data through Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure. Customers can get started today with the current SAP Gateway for Microsoft and upgrade to the new version when it becomes available in the second half of 2014. More information is available at SAP Gateway for Microsoft.

Increased mobile collaboration
Microsoft and SAP plan to help customers conduct business anywhere and anytime by developing and co-marketing SAP mobile apps for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1. These new applications will be managed and secured by the SAP Mobile Secure portfolio or Windows Intune. Examples of prospective offerings resulting from this increased collaboration will be showcased at SAPPHIRE^® NOW, being held June 3–5, 2014, in Orlando, Florida. More information can be found here.

Monday's announcements bring exciting new capabilities to customers and opportunities for partners and developers through the combined strengths of Microsoft and SAP applications and platforms. You can learn more here.

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 258,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.