BEIJING -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) and China Telecom today announced a strategic partnership in cloud computing through which the SAP Cloud portfolio will be offered to small and large organizations in China by China Datacom Corporation Limited (CDC), a joint venture between SAP and China Communication Services (CCS), a subsidiary of China Telecom Group. CCS will be the first local customer to adopt the industry-leading offerings. The announcement was made at China SAPPHIRE, being held November 20-21 in Beijing.

The cooperation marks another development in the partnership that SAP and China Telecom began in 2011 and will expand on the current work the companies have done to promote mobile development and device management. With the inclusion of cloud solutions from SAP, the companies will move from basic cooperation such as Internet Data Center (IDC) to a partnership on cloud offerings and application services.

The first solutions to be made available through the partnership and hosted in a China Telecom IDC will be the complete, state-of-the-art suite of human capital management (HCM) solutions from SuccessFactors, an SAP company, making SAP the first international software vendor to deliver an integrated cloud HCM offering in China. SuccessFactors provides an integrated, collaborative HCM suite in the cloud that helps manage the entire employee life cycle — from recruit to retire. CCS will be the first customer to subscribe to the SuccessFactors solution hosted in a China data center and expects to have 12,000 users.

SAP AG (NYSE/Frankfurt: SAP)