Lumen teams up with SAP to offer SAP HANA in the cloud for SMEs

In order to help simplify cloud services for small and medium-sized enterprises, SAP has teamed up with Lumen to offer SAP HANA on Lumen's cloud platform.

Using SAP Business One, Lumen will host and manage SAP HANA infrastructure for businesses globally. The combined offering was designed to help simplify the configuration and deployment of SAP HANA in order to support value-added resellers (VARs), channel partners and 75,000 small and mid-market customers.

“Until today, VARs were typically on their own to manage and host their instances of SAP Business One. Now, the Lumen platform can quickly and cost effectively enable intelligent enterprises with SAP HANA in the cloud,” said Joost Tigelaar, SAP vice president of global SME ERP sales, in a statement. “The Lumen platform can help partners and customers by offering them a choice of hybrid deployment models and cloud infrastructure providers, bringing the benefits of both SAP HANA and the cloud to our ecosystem.”

SAP Business One is SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for small businesses and the subsidiaries of midmarket and large enterprises. It's delivered globally through an ecosystem of over 800 authorized channel partners. SAP Business One connects and streamlines operational processes and provides real-time insights for actionable decision-making.

The Lumen platform blends edge computing, its global fiber network infrastructure, connected security and cloud connectivity. The platform manages SAP HANA infrastructure for businesses using SAP Business One throughout most of the world. SAP HANA on the Lumen platform includes a monthly service-based pricing model for the entire stack of software and services.

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The SAP HANA service will be provisioned on Lumen's edge cloud nodes. Lumen turned up its first block of cloud edge nodes in its most recent third quarter. Lumen first announced its edge compute strategy last year. In 2019, Lumen said it had more than 100 edge compute nodes across the U.S., but it's now in the process of adding 150 more around the globe.

As of last month, Lumen had six edge nodes up and running across the U.S., with plans to turn-up additional locations in the U.S. and globally. 

Due to its large fiber network, Lumen can reach 98% of the enterprises in the U.S., Europe and some Latin American countries with a low latency of 5 milliseconds one way with its edge compute nodes. The Lumen platform also uses orchestration tools to tie into its cloud partners. Lumen has cloud partnerships in place with the likes of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and Amazon Web Services, among others.

"Lumen’s partnership with SAP opened the creative door to develop a service that simplifies how enterprises tap into the cloud – a competitive tipping point for the digital age,” said Paul Savill, Lumen senior vice president of enterprise product management, in a statement. “We’re the first cloud management platform that SAP has partnered with to host and manage this SAP HANA infrastructure for businesses."

SAP has previously said that by 2025 it will no longer support on-premises database platforms, which now requires customers to make the move to a SAP S/4HANA environment.