A leading provider of business software, SAP is expanding its relationship with Dell in the areas of cloud based computing and in-memory databases.

The two companies are expected to make an announcement in this regard on Monday during the Sapphire conference in Orlando. SAP customers will be allowed to use the applications on Dell's VIS Next Generation Datacenter Platform.

Representative of the University of Kentucky that is moving its SAP implementation to a Dell-managed cloud will join the representatives from the two companies, according to Kaj van de Loo, senior vice president of technology strategy at SAP.

Van de Loo expressed that SAP had worked ensure its software can be easily virtualized years ago but it had to carry out some testing to make them compatible with the management tools and other aspects of Dell's platform.

Dell will start selling based on SAP's HANA in-memory database technology, which holds data to be processed in RAM instead of reading it from the disk resulting in a much improved performance.

Dell's HANA machines will be based on PowerEdge R910 iron and the company already has a beverages distributor Charmer-Sunbelt Group as one of the first customers. Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu are among the companies making HANA hardware.

"We know that customers have existing relationships they want to maintain," van de Loo said. "We're convinced this strategy will help us out-innovate whoever else might be out there trying to create one integrated stack for all purposes."