chreis

At this years German SAP User Group event (Sep 29th - Oct 1st in Bremen, Germany) Leo Apotheker, CEO SAP AG, named Virtualization/Cloud Computing as #1 IT trend in his keynote on Tuesday. With about 3.000 attendees the DSAG conference is a clear leading indicator for broad adoption of vitualization into each and every SAP environment. In comparison to last year there is a clear trend to 100% virtualization.

Last week marked the anniversary of VMware becoming an SAP Global Technology Partner, and SAP's official support for VMware ESX as a platform for SAP applications on Windows and Linux in test, development and production environments. In just twelve months, we've seen an enormous amount of momentum among customers and partners, and significant advances in the VMware-SAP partnership. Looking back over the year, we've seen:

• Great customer adoption with hundreds of customers using VMware in their SAP environments. This has allowed us to create several new case studies, with more being developed for publication next year. And more customers are talking publically about their experiences with running SAP landscapes on VMware Infrastructure - for example, Dow Chemical, T-Systems and Colgate gave presentations at SAP COIL Virtualization Week in April. Checkpoint Systems spoke at SAP TechEd in France.
• The rapid expansion and maturing of the VMware-SAP partner ecosystem. The VMware SAP Solutions Partner Community now has 24 members in countries around the world. We're also working on several technical and go-to-market initiatives with our server and storage partners. Highlights of last year's activities include:
  • The Virtualization Competency Center for SAP that VMware co-sponsors with AddOn sees lots of customer traffic.
  • At SAP COIL in both Palo Alto, CA and Tokyo, Japan we have built disaster recovery solutions using partner storage and VMware SRM, as well as an upgrade proof point using VMware. Many customers have been able to see demos of this solution in one of the labs.
  • SAP COIL in Palo Alto and Tokyo, as well as the CoE, run on VMware Infrastructure - allowing the member partners to provision environments for demos and projects rapidly and maximizing use of the IT resources in these facilities.
• VMware and SAP are becoming more and more strategically and technically aligned; some of the ways we are working together include:
  • Attending and speaking at each other's conferences. We saw a great deal of interest from customers at our booths and sessions at various SAP events, including SAP TechEd and SAPPHIRE conferences and SAP Virtualization Week. SAP spoke at VMworld this year, along with some of our joint customers.
  • A successful implementation of the integrated support framework between VMware and SAP - meaning customers can be assured that support issues related to virtualization will be handled seamlessly.
  • SAP gave a technical preview of the integration between SAP Adaptive Computing Controller and VMware vCenter at various conferences including SAP TechEd, generating a great deal of customer interest.
  • SAP awarded VMware the silver medal for the SAP Pinnacle Award in the first year we were able to apply.
  • VMware is a charter member of the SAP Enterprise Virtualization Community

• The next major release of VMware Infrastructure will include support for virtual machines with 8 vCPU and cool features like fault tolerance.
• SAP User Group Germany founded a "Workforce VMware". During their annual event in February called "Technology Days" both SAP and VMware will talk about benefits of SAP virtualization.
• SAP Virtualization Week: VMware will be speaking, and there are already several VMware-SAP joint customers who've signed up to talk about their virtualized SAP environments.
• As always, we'll have lots of discussions and beneficial exchange of knowledge with our customers at conferences and events, so we hope you'll come and see us in 2009!