SAP faces up to virtualisation challenge

April 15, 2008: SAP is looking to develop new strategies for "business process-driven" virtualisation in a new co-operative effort with a range of enterprise storage and IT vendors.

At SAP Virtualization Week 2008, held from April 7-10 at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto, California, the formation of the "enterprise virtualsation community" was announced.

This teams SAP with a range of vendors including AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, Intel Corporation, NetApp, Novell, Red Hat, Sun and VMware.

"When I'm speaking with customers, virtualisation is discussed in almost every meeting," said Vishal Sikka, chief technology officer, SAP.

"Companies are looking at how to best take advantage of virtualisation technology today and in the future, while customers are constantly evaluating their existing infrastructure and application investments. They know that leveraging virtual environments is critical for cost savings and to drive efficiencies."

Acccording to SAP, virtualisation can deliver savings in the cost of running hardware dedicated to SAP applications of as much as 70 percent.

The new alliance will seek too develop an approach to designing new processes that run in virtualised environments using modeling techniques — without having to know any details about virtualisation.

"VMware and SAP have a strong partnership to deliver superior SAP implementations for customers," said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware.

"We look forward to accelerating the uptake of a new generation of enterprise SOA business applications from SAP with the benefits of VMware virtualisation. Joint customers can experience dramatically lower total cost of ownership of their data centre infrastructure, higher application uptime and reliability, improved productivity, strengthened security and a greener carbon footprint."

Comment on this story.