SAP continued its cloud push, rolling out a new enterprise initiative that provides a single portal for customers to access a basket of SAP’s services. The vendor also reiterated its cloud-neutral stance to counter the recent dissolution of a preferred cloud partnership with Microsoft.

The boldly named SAP Business Network ties together SAP’s Ariba Network, Logistics Business Network, and Asset Intelligence Network. Those services will provide a broad view of a user’s supply chain ecosystem, logistics, traceability, and equipment management and maintenance through a unified portal.

SAP CEO Christian Klein explained during a press conference as part of this week’s SAP Sapphire virtual event that this package taps into SAP’s acquisition earlier this year of business process intelligence (BPI) provider Signavio. And it unlocks data and untapped knowledge that is often sitting just under the surface at most enterprises.

“We and our partners have so much knowledge, we know every industry process, we know what really works in the core processes of a company, and we also know what doesn't work so well. And we have so much expertise, so much knowledge, and BPI brings this knowledge now into one tool, and it allows customers now to not only measure and benchmark their business processes, but also use this expertise, use this insight, and design the business processes in a way that helps them to grow the business,” Klein said.

Julia White, chief marketing and solutions officer at SAP, added that the modularity of the platform also allows customers to better prepare for supply chain disruptions, a fear highlighted by recent and ongoing geo-political and worldwide health concerns.

“I think historically it has been kind of a big buyer will come on and suppliers will join and it remains still largely one-to-one or too much just one-to-one,” White explained. “Now the ability to come in and for the suppliers to say, ‘oh, I came in with this buyer but now I see all these other opportunities,’ and for the buyer to know if something happens to you politically, something happens from a supply chain disruption, they quickly have that option.”

Klein also noted that the move builds on SAP’s launch of its RISE with SAP platform targeted at getting customers into its cloud-based services.

White further explained that the initial Business Network push will be focused on its larger customers. She noted that SAP would onboard a customer’s “100 most strategic suppliers” into the program, “making sure that they have that trading partner network as they get started.”

“The more people that join the more value we gain and so putting our effort and our resources behind jumpstarting the ecosystem for those buyers so that there's a rich ecosystem of suppliers,” White said.

During a separate interview with SDxCentral, Brian Duffy, president of cloud for SAP, noted that one item missing from this initial push is a module from its Qualtrics customer experience management division, though he noted that specific announcements tied to Qualtrics would be upcoming. Qualtrics earlier this year finally moved on its long-simmering initial public offering plans, which netted SAP a healthy return on the $8 billion it spent acquiring the CEM vendor in late 2018.

SAP this week also highlighted sustainability as a core business process with the launch of its SAP Responsible Design and Production products that provide a sustainable workflow for product designers, a SAP Product Footprint Management product that can track sustainability through a product lifecycle, and the SAP Sustainability Control Tower to provide end-to-end visibility on those goals.

White, who joined SAP earlier this year, having spent the previous 20 years working at Microsoft, also attempted to quell any “drama” around the pending end of the preferred enterprise resource planning (ERP) arrangement with her former employer.

SAP in 2019 struck a deal with Microsoft to have the cloud giant resell components of SAP’s Cloud Platform alongside its own Azure cloud service. That deal, which is set to expire on June 30, built on its previously announced Embrace reference architecture that is designed to smooth a path into SAP’s S/4HANA cloud platform that has grown increasingly complex and daunting for an enterprise’s IT department.

“We know there’s been a little swirl recently and … there’s no drama,” White said. “There's people looking for drama right now, but there is none,” adding that “we're working with all of the providers and have good relationships with all the providers.”

This echoed comments Klein made last year when he noted that “the hyperscalars are our best friends on the cloud infrastructure side because this is not a business where SAP is actually playing and also doesn’t want to play in the future. They have huge scale, they have infrastructure which provides our customers with the elasticity they need and with that comes a low [total cost of ownership]. Partnering with them is the best decision we could have ever made.”

That’s not to say that SAP has not had any recent drama.

The vendor earlier this year agreed to pay more than $8 million in fines after it admitted to circumventing a U.S. ban on the sale of its software to Iran.

And it also received personal attention from a rival Oracle’s Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison, who spent most of his company’s most recent earnings call touting Oracle’s numerous customer “victories” over its German competitor.