INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
Standard Bank SA accelerates
journey to digital enterprise
with Microsoft and SAP
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to move on-premise SAP ERP and SAP
S/4HANA customers to the cloud through
industry-specific best practices, reference
architectures and cloud-delivered services.
L–R: Lillian Barnard, Microsoft South Africa
Managing Director; Sabelo Nkwanyana,
Standard Bank CIO for Personal and
Business Banking South Africa; and Cathy
Smith, Managing Director of SAP Africa
S
tandard Bank South Africa is moving
its core SAP Cloud Platform services
to Microsoft Azure to significantly
improve the experience customers have with
the bank while enabling it to introduce new
solutions to market more efficiently.
This accelerates the Digital Transformation
of SAP customers to S/4HANA by partnering
with Microsoft and using jointly developed
reference architectures, roadmaps and
industry best practices. Many enterprises are
looking to reduce their reliance on their own
data centres and moving more of their core
workloads to the cloud.
Sabelo Nkwanyana, Standard Bank’s
CIO for Personal and Business Banking
SA, said leveraging the computing power
of Microsoft and the product innovation
capability of SAP demonstrates how
Standard Bank is embracing partnerships
and ecosystems to develop customised
solutions for its clients.
“SAP has a deep understanding of our
business requirements and how we want
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to ensure our customers are happy with
our service offering. This partnership
continues our focus on innovation by
leveraging the respective skills of SAP and
Microsoft to transform the digitisation and
personalisation journey for our customers,”
said Nkwanyana.
Lillian Barnard, Managing Director,
Microsoft South Africa, said: “The Project
Embrace initiative between Microsoft
and SAP announced globally last year is
centred around the customer journey to
SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud Platform on
Microsoft Azure.
“The work that we are doing with Standard
Bank is the first local demonstration of this
partnership and another milestone in the
journey Microsoft is on with Standard Bank,
to bring innovation into every aspect of
the bank’s IT system and enable enriched
interactions with the bank’s customers.”
The partnership brings together SAP
and Microsoft, along with a global
network of selected system integrators,
Barnard added: “Enterprises are migrating
to cloud providers at an accelerated rate.
This makes it critical for our customers
to have the right cloud infrastructure in
place, enabling them to unlock the power
of innovation. Microsoft’s significant
investment on the African continent, with
our first hyperscale data centre regions
in Johannesburg and Cape Town, means
many more partners and customers are
enjoying the benefits of our intelligent
cloud platform.”
Speaking on the SAP partnership specifically,
Barnard added: “Project Embrace has three
tenets at its heart: simplify, accelerate and
innovate. By accelerating our customers’
Digital Transformation journey, we are
enabling them to become agile, efficient
digital enterprises on Microsoft Azure – with a
cloud platform optimised for SAP – leveraging
best practice and specialist expertise.”
“Through Project Embrace, we are now able
to better identify our business pain points
and effectively address them through
technologies that deliver a demonstratable
return on investment. Having the ability to
more accurately predict where customer
challenges and dissatisfaction will occur
enables a more flexible enterprise
environment,” concluded Nkwanyana of
Standard Bank SA.
“We can help our customers transform their
businesses and their lives in a secure way.
This is much more than SAP and Microsoft
supplying us with products. This is about
fundamentally enhancing our digital journey
for the future.” n
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