OREANDA-NEWS. March 18, 2015. Huawei announced at the CeBIT 2015 trade show an expanded partnership with SAP to establish joint innovation efforts in Shenzhen, China and Walldorf, Germany. The SAP-Huawei joint innovation efforts will focus on establishing a technical collaboration between SAP and Huawei, and to advance research on the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide new solutions to market.

Industry 4.0 is considered to be the fourth industrial revolution following those driven by the steam engine, electricity and information technology. Industry 4.0 refers to the use of ICT to integrate cyber-virtual and cyber-physical systems to support smart manufacturing, with information and physical objects connected, and machines linked to a unified smart network. The technology is expected to enable automated manufacturing processes, debugging and system failure recovery for maximized manufacturing efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Mr. William Xu, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Huawei, said, “Huawei values our win-win partnerships with SAP, a global leader in enterprise applications and software. Together, we are striving to develop a model of China-Europe cooperation. Following the two companies’ collaboration on SAP HANA running on SAP-certified Huawei hardware, joint contact center, big data, smart cities and bring your own device (BYOD), the establishment of the SAP-Huawei joint innovation efforts and partnership on Industry 4.0 and IoT is marking a new milestone for our strategic alliance. With extensive experience and expertise in ICT infrastructure, Huawei is committed to collaborating with SAP to leverage our respective technologies and market capabilities to develop differentiated IoT and cloud solutions. These solutions are designed to help global enterprises across different sectors deploy new technologies easily and quickly."

As part of Huawei and SAP’s extended partnership, the companies will work on integrating Huawei’s ICT infrastructure and connectivity solutions with SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP applications and analytic tools. The initial stage of Huawei and SAP’s collaboration will focus on developing agile manufacturing, smart energy and transportation solutions with SAP HANA Cloud Platform. This encompasses hardware and connected equipment integration, and applications and analytics tools integration, respectively. Together, the companies are committed to facilitating the deployment of solutions for customers in the transportation, shipping and vehicle analytics services, and maintenance and warning services industries in Greater China and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

Mr. Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board, SAP SE, Products & Innovation, said, “Huawei and SAP complement each other: Huawei offers extensive experience in ICT infrastructure while SAP, amongst others, focuses on the development of an open platform and enterprise software. Our collaboration will be based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform to create value for our customers in the era of Industry 4.0 and IoT. We believe that technological collaborations that integrate our companies’ expertise will enable us to create enriched enterprise solutions and bring even greater value to customers in China, Europe and emerging markets."

Since 2012, Huawei and SAP worked together on a high-performance solution where the Huawei FusionCube, FusionServer RH8100 and RH5885 were used to support the SAP HANA platform and applications. Throughout 2014, SAP HANA running on Huawei hardware enjoyed great success and received recognition from industry-leading enterprises across China, EMEA and other regions. With the establishment of the joint innovation efforts, Huawei and SAP will expand technological collaborations in cloud computing, Industry 4.0, and IoT. Through the envisioned integrationof Huawei’s cloud data and enterprise networking offerings with SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA) and cloud applications, the two companies will address opportunities in the cloud services market. Together, Huawei and SAP are dedicated to advancing research to provide new solutions, and aim to set benchmarks for the manufacturing, telecoms, utilities, energy and other sectors.