SAP struck a deal with Microsoft to have the cloud giant resell components of SAP’s Cloud Platform alongside its own Azure cloud service. The move comes as SAP is undergoing a major leadership change and further builds on Microsoft’s growing push into the enterprise space.

The deal is targeted at migrating SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) application and S/4HANA customers from on-premises locations to the public cloud. It will provide those customers with a unified reference architecture for that migration.

The reference architecture provides customers with a set of foundational services running on SAP Cloud Platform to support the integration and extension of SAP systems to third-party applications running in the cloud or on premises; a technical blueprint that includes the required SAP and hyperscaler components to run the customer’s applications; and a guide into the S/4HANA platform generated by hyperscalers and system integrators.

It will also provide a roadmap for the migration of existing direct SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud customers to hyperscale cloud providers if they want to make that move. “SAP continues with its long-standing policy of supporting choice for those customers who request alternatives based on business requirements,” the company noted in its announcement.

The deal builds on SAP’s previously announced Embrace project that it unveiled at its Sapphire event earlier this year. SAP at that time said that it worked with Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and other system integrators on the project.

The company explained that the focus of the work was to smooth a path into SAP’s S/4HANA cloud platform that has grown increasingly complex and daunting for an enterprise’s IT department.

Jennifer Morgan, who was president of SAP’s Cloud Business Group at that time, explained during a roundtable discussion that customers were piecing a lot of this work together themselves, but that with Embrace customers are getting something that is “much needed and probably a little bit later than many needed. The market is just moving very fast.”

“It’s more a frustration around spending time with customers talking about the wrong things,” Morgan said of the reasoning behind the new project. “The natural result will be that customers will understand the path more clearly.”

Morgan has since been named co-CEO of SAP alongside Christian Klein following the abrupt departure of long-time SAP CEO Bill McDermott.

Microsoft played top billing at the initial Embrace launch and continues to be a big part of SAP’s public cloud focus. Morgan explained during that launch that based on SAP’s initial data, it wanted to “cut its teeth and work with Microsoft. … They have put in the work on this.”

“In the past we were going to our customers with too many specific projects,” Morgan said. “To have that SAP and Microsoft Azure reference architecture it makes it more clear for our customers.”

SAP and Microsoft have been working together recently on a number of similar initiatives. One is the Open Data Initiative that was initially announced in 2017. That program provides a blueprint for the sharing of data between the companies’ respective applications and platforms. The main goal is to lower barriers between customer experience management silos.

Microsoft earlier this year also struck a similar deal with Oracle that set up a direct network link between their respective cloud platforms that allows enterprises to connect their workloads between the two cloud providers. The move provides interoperability for workloads running across the respective cloud operations, which means customers can run different parts of their workloads in those different cloud environments simultaneously.