SAP and its partners are setting up an advisory group to help customers get virtualisation technology working in a business context.
The idea seems to be to put key technology vendors – in particular, AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, Intel, NetApp, Novell, Red Hat, Sun and VMware – in touch with users and to develop strategies for business process-driven virtualisation that demonstrably cuts costs and improves efficiencies.
The new initiative was launched yesterday at SAP Virtualisation Week 2008, at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto, California.
Vishal Sikka, SAP chief technology officer, made the point that companies today face the dual challenges of managing increasingly complex computing environments alongside the growing demand for IT to enable business agility.
SAP’s enterprise virtualisation community, he said, is designed to help customers address these issues by providing them with an open approach to getting the best out of virtualization products and technologies from SAP partners.
“When I’m speaking with customers, virtualisation is discussed in almost every meeting,” said Sikka. “Companies … know that leveraging virtual environments is critical for cost savings and to drive efficiencies.
“Today, SAP is breaking ground by leveraging the power and innovation of the [partner] ecosystem and bringing together these important virtualisation vendors to assist companies in optimising business processes in virtualised environments.”
He also suggested that this latest initiative builds on work SAP has been doing since 2003 to enable SAP solutions to run in virtualised environments, focused particularly around the SAP NetWeaver platform.
SAP claims that virtualisation is helping customers to reduce the cost of running hardware dedicated to SAP applications by as much as 70%.
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