This version of the story was updated September 16 at 7:45 a.m. ET.

German software powerhouse SAP AG said late Monday that it has agreed to sell the European customer base of its applications hosting business to Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems corporate services division.

Neither SAP nor Deutsche Telekom revealed financial terms of the agreement, which they hope to conclude next month pending approval by antitrust regulators.

The deal does not include the sale of fixed assets. It transfers about 90 European customers from SAP to T-Systems. The 90 are not the same set of 90 customers using SAP’s struggling software-as-a-service ERP offering, Business ByDesign.

T-Systems, a systems integrator and applications management provider, already partners with SAP as a service provider. According to a joint press release, SAP customers, including Shell, MAN, and Linde, route SAP applications over the T-Systems network in Germany.

“I am pleased that our certified hosting partner, T-Systems, will take on delivering external hosting services for SAP hosting customers,” said Wolfgang Krips, senior vice president of SAP managed services, in a statement. “Even though there will be a transition to a new provider, I am confident that customers will find the gradual transition to T-Systems to be smooth and very manageable so they may continue to execute their IT agendas.”

A spokesman told Managing Automation that the "decision to exit the external hosting business was primarily a strategic decision. It was part of a larger strategy to focus on our core competencies" of creating applications. One published report said that SAP lacked the scale to extract value from its hosting business.

SAP traditionally has sold its products to customers that deploy the software on their in-house application servers. Some end users elect to have SAP host the applications in remote data centers. The mid-market Business ByDesign product is SAP's first major on-demand application offering.