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On June 4, 2013, IBM announced its acquisition of SoftLayer under not disclosed financial terms, but according to Reuters in a deal that could fetch more than $2 billion,[13] to form an IBM Cloud Services Division.[14][15] At the time of acquisition, Softlayer was described as the biggest privately held cloud infrastructure provider (IaaS) in the world.[16]
https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftLayer
SAP SE (/ɛseɪˈpi/) (Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung; "Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing") is a European multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations.[2] SAP is headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, Germany with regional offices in 180 countries.[3][4] The company has over 335,000 customers in over 180 countries.[4] The company is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.[5]
In 2014, IBM and SAP began a partnership to sell cloud-based services.[21] Likewise, in 2015, SAP also partnered with HPE to provide secure hybrid cloud-based services running the SAP platform.[22] Both HPE and IBM provide infrastructure services to SAP, and SAP runs its SAP HANA cloud solution on top. SAP has announced additional partnerships with Microsoft in order to give customers tools for data visualization, as well as improved mobile applications.[23]
SAP exceeded its revenue projections due to the expansion in its cloud business and the success of SAP HANA. The growth can also be partially attributed to the acquisitions of Concur and Fieldglass.[24]
The company announced plans in 2016 to invest heavily into technology relating to Internet of Things (IoT) as part of a strategy to capitalize on the growth in that market. For that purpose, €2 billion is planned for investment in relevant sectors by the end of 2020.[25] SAP will also launch a new product line called SAP IoT, which "will combine large amounts of data from things connected to the Internet with machine learning and SAP's real-time database S/4 HANA."[25]
SAP S/4HANA
In 2015, the company launched SAP S/4HANA, the newest generation of the SAP Business Suite. It was written natively for the SAP HANA platform. It offers cloud, on-premises and hybrid deployment options to customers, with its benefits including a smaller data footprint, higher throughput, faster analytics and faster access to data. It also allows existing SAP Business Suite customers to upgrade to this product from SAP Business Suite.[26]
In 2016, SAP introduced SAP HANA, Express Edition which is meant to run on personal computers or on cloud computing platforms for students and other small-scale developers.[27]
Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, compared the release of SAP S/4HANA to a "moonshot", describing it as the most important launch in the company's history.[28]
https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_SE
Bill McDermott. He was the guy sitting at Trump’s right hand during the dinner in Davos. WOW.