Alibaba and SAP joined forces two years ago to provide companies in China with cloud solutions via Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of the Alibaba Group. SAP has now announced that the two companies are planning to collaborate to offer SAP S/4HANA Cloud in China, to help customers transition to the cloud. Alibaba Cloud’s customers will also be able to deploy SAP Cloud Platform on Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to extend their current business solutions, develop new applications, and integrate third-party technologies.

As part of the agreement, SAP will continue to employ Alibaba Cloud’s technology, and Alibaba will adopt SAP S/4HANA software to drive its own innovations. The two companies will also explore further collaboration in the Internet of Things (IoT), New Retail, and New Manufacturing, as well as in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), for which SAP is the first company in Europe to have founded an ethics advisory panel .