Disclaimer: This blogpost has been co-published at community.intel.com.

Introduction

Intel and SAP are expanding their long-standing collaboration through a dedicated SAP HANA Cloud co-development initiative, bringing engineering teams closer together to help SAP HANA Cloud run even better on current and future Intel platforms. This is the start of a new chapter in how Intel and SAP co-innovate: aligning SAP’s product direction with Intel’s platform roadmap, so optimizations show up where they matter most, in real customer environments running on leading cloud service providers.

A new chapter of co-engineering for SAP HANA Cloud

This initiative is founded on the principle that early and comprehensive collaboration between platform and software engineering teams leads to enhanced customer experiences. The ongoing partnership has demonstrated great benefits for SAP HANA during the last decade.

Building on our success of optimizing SAP HANA, we are now shifting our focus to SAP HANA Cloud and to cloud-native architectures. This transition reflects our dedication to leveraging evolving Intel technologies and delivering advanced SAP solutions tailored for modern mission critical cloud environments. SAP HANA Cloud is SAP’s strategic translytical and multi-model database service and the foundation for business AI, trusted by tens of thousands of active enterprises worldwide.

Central to this effort is a shared commitment to proactively optimize SAP HANA Cloud for Intel architectures, helping to maximize price-performance, scalability, efficiency, and production-readiness for cloud-native SAP solutions. Practically, this entails synchronizing SAP product development with Intel's platform roadmaps at earlier stages, enabling customers to realize improvements as new technologies are introduced.

This collaboration creates a direct technical bridge between SAP product development and Intel architecture/platform roadmaps, helping ensure new capabilities and platform features and enhancements translate into real, production-ready outcomes across SAP's certified cloud service providers.

Value Across the Ecosystem

The co-development initiative is designed to deliver clear value across all stakeholders:

For SAP: Architectural optimizations for SAP HANA Cloud features, accelerated technology adoption, and reduced risk during transitions, such as migrating to new Intel Xeon generations, introduce new and/or enhanced Intel features.

For Intel: Ensuring SAP HANA Cloud runs at its best on Intel x86 Architectures and maintains and improves competitiveness against alternative architectures. Strengthening Intel's position for SAP's strategic cloud deployments at the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).

For Customers and CSPs: Improved price-performance, efficiency, scalability, and resiliency are direct benefits from joint SAP-Intel developments in both performance and feature sets.

What we’re building together

Intel and SAP share a vision to proactively optimize SAP HANA Cloud on current and future Intel platforms, delivering value for SAP, cloud service providers, and, most importantly, customers running mission-critical workloads on SAP HANA Cloud. By connecting SAP product development with Intel architecture and platform roadmaps, the teams are creating an engine for continuous optimization, early validation, and faster production readiness.

Where we’ll focus first

The initiative is organized around three practical workstreams designed to turn joint engineering into customer-impacting outcomes:

Platform Development

Intel and SAP will work together on feature and workload optimization across key SAP HANA Cloud scenarios, such as OLTP, OLAP, scale-up, and scale-out, while also streamlining the introduction of new Intel® Xeon® processor-based cloud instances and their new capabilities.

Performance Benchmarking

The teams will jointly review SAP HANA Cloud–specific benchmarks and tune for strong, repeatable results on Intel platforms at CSPs, addressing constraints observed in production and helping ensure competitive performance compared with alternative architectures. This applies to Transactional, Analytical and AI-enhanced workloads.

Product Readiness

Intel will help SAP accelerate the adoption of new instance types and configurations across SAP HANA Cloud editions and ensure that proven optimizations carry forward smoothly over time, so customers benefit consistently throughout the service lifecycle.

What does this mean for customers and cloud service providers for SAP solutions?

For customers, this initiative is about turning platform innovation into practical outcomes, better price-performance, better efficiency, and faster readiness for what comes next. For cloud service providers, it’s about tighter alignment and earlier validation so SAP HANA Cloud can take advantage of new Intel capabilities in real production environments.

Looking ahead: stay tuned

As this co-development effort ramps up, SAP HANA Cloud is positioned to benefit from optimizations on Intel Xeon platforms, including Intel Xeon 6 processors and future generations. The focus is straightforward: accelerate production readiness, scale and efficiency, and deliver continuous improvements that customers can use, without disruption.

This is just the beginning. Intel and SAP are deepening co-engineering for SAP HANA Cloud and Cloud Native Architectures at SAP to help SAP to scale, perform, and evolve on Intel platforms as SAP Cloud ERP adoption accelerates. Stay tuned for the innovations Intel and SAP will deliver to customers, and for more updates as the teams turn this initiative into tangible improvements across cloud environments.

Notices and Disclaimers

Performance varies by use, configuration, and other factors. Learn more on the Performance Index site. 

Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available ​updates.  See backup for configuration details.  No product or component can be absolutely secure.

Your costs and results may vary.

Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software, or service activation.

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