IBM Corp. is turning to its partners for help with widening the adoption of Watson in the enterprise. As part of the effort, the company this morning announced an alliance with SAP SE that will see the capabilities of the cognitive computing platform made available for users of the latter’s flagship S/4HANA business software suite.

The bundle includes the German technology giant’s core enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems along with four other applications that together aim to cover all the mission-critical processes in a modern organization. IBM also intends to integrate Watson with a number of the vertical-specific solutions that SAP offers alongside S/4HANA, which target key sectors such as the healthcare and manufacturing industries.

The vendors didn’t specify exactly which of those niche applications will gain access to the analytics platform’s features, nor, for that matter, what kind of new functionality can customers expect to receive. In fact, IBM didn’t even mention Watson by name in its announcement, only revealing that the integration effort will focus on its “cognitive APIs”. The company is presumably referring to the on-demand data processing services available in its Watson Developer Cloud, which help automate specialized tasks such as measuring customer sentiment and text-to-speech conversion.

If the current feature set is anything to go by, then SAP and IBM are probably looking to deliver something akin to what mutual rival Microsoft Corp. offers with its Cortana Intelligence Suite. The bundle combines the virtual assistant with a number of Redmond’s cloud-based analytics services to make complex operational information accessible to everyday knowledge workers. Big Blue’s announcement specifies that the Watson integration will similarly target a “broad range of business users and … all C-suite professions.”

But IBM and SAP aren’t settling for merely leveling the playing against Microsoft. As part of today’s partnership, the vendors also plan to let S/4HANA customers deploy the software in a hybrid cloud configuration. That means a hospital, for instance, will be able to process sensitive patient records behind the firewall on Big Blue’s Power systems while running everything else in its SoftLayer public cloud to reduce infrastructure requirements.

Image via Wikimedia