SAP Cloud Apps Will Now Run on IBM's SoftLayer

German business software company SAP and computing giant IBM are teaming up in the cloud. SAP says it has tapped IBM’s SoftLayer service to run its suite of cloud-ready business applications.

The plan calls for SAP to let its customers run its HANA Enterprise cloud on IBM’s SoftLayer, something that Amazon’s Web Services cloud unit has been able to do for some time.

One point of the move, said SAP exec Kevin Ichhpurani, is to take advantage of IBM’s global footprint so that customers using SAP applications can do so within the borders of their own countries. “A lot of our customers are concerned about data sovereignty and privacy controls,” he said. “IBM was the obvious choice to help us address that.”

Big Blue said earlier this year it would spent $1.2 billion to expand SoftLayer by building 15 new data centers around the world. SAP already has 20 data centers of its own.

It’s a good business win for IBM, which spent $2 billion to acquire SoftLayer, now the backbone of its cloud computing service offerings. IBM has since moved all of its software offerings to SoftLayer, and it shares a lot of customers with SAP.

SAP is another one of those old-school software companies that has been struggling to make the transition to selling its stuff in the cloud. It has been aggressive on the acquisition front, and earlier this month dropped more than $7.3 billion to acquire Concur, an expense-tracking software company. Before that, it spent nearly $8 billion to acquire SuccessFactors and Ariba.

We’ll get a closer look at how much progress SAP’s cloud business is making when it reports quarterly earnings next week.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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