SAP SE has made no secret of its plan to transition from licensing on-premise software to selling cloud services, an ambitious transformation that relies on partners to provide the groundwork. Rayn Veerubhotla, Vice President of Global Technology Partners for SAP, appeared on theCUBE at Amazon.com Inc.’s recent re:Invent conference to explain how the retail giant fits into the picture.

With Gartner Inc. pegging its market share at 87 percent as of June, Amazon ranks as the unrivaled leader of the infrastructure-as-a-service space, making it a key ally for any vendor hoping to sell its software through the cloud. SAP picked up on Amazon’s central role fairly early in the evolution of the trend, Veerubhotla told theCUBE host Jeff Kelly, but the relationship only took off in the last two years as the pay-as-you-go model started making waves in the enterprise.

“AWS is a natural partner for us as we go down this cloud journey given their leadership position in cloud and our leadership position in applications, which makes it a very aggressive partnership for us,” Veerubhotla explained. And with a fast growing number of organizations now moving mission-critical workloads that have traditionally run on SAP software to the cloud, an element of urgency has also been added to the alliance.

The business intelligence giant hopes to capture that shifting spending with HANA, an in-memory database it developed to help customers tame the vast amounts of information flowing into the corporate network today. Veerubhotlaat said that SAP offers the platform through Amazon’s cloud on an hourly basis, a stark departure from the traditional on-premise licensing model it has practiced for the last few decades that acts to significantly lower the entry cost.

Eliminating the barrier posed by upfront fees makes HANA accessible to organizations that previously may not have been able to afford it, the executive highlighted, particularly startups and mid-sized companies. SAP, he added, is also courting developers with a free edition aimed at fostering the creation of complementary applications on top the database.

That ties into the company’s broader efforts to deliver a portfolio of industry-specific services for HANA capable of countering the similar initiatives rivals Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp. have been pursuing as of late. Yet while they’re aiming for the same opportunity, SAP’s competitors are taking an entirely different approach to pursuing it, hosting their respective services in private data centers whereas the business intelligence titan largely relies on partners such as Amazon to provide the infrastructure.

That approach denies SAP of some potential revenues, but according to Veerubhotla, the ecosystem-based approach is what fits best with his company’s ambitious growth plans.“We have a stated ambition to triple our cloud revenues in the next two years, which means our infrastructure has to grow along the path,” he explained. “So we’re looking at partners to supplement our infrastructure, we’ll continue to have a few data centers but it is not practical for us to have data centers everywhere.”

Watch the entire interview with Veerubhotla below.