SAP NetWeaver® Extends Adaptive Computing Capabilities to Companies

SAP NetWeaver® Extends Adaptive Computing Capabilities to Companies Running on the Microsoft Platform
SAP Invites Partners to Participate in the Adaptive Computing Compliance Test to Bring Greater Efficiency and Flexibility to IT Environments


HANOVER, Germany - March 09, 2006 - SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that it is extending the adaptive computing capabilities of the SAP NetWeaver® platform to Microsoft environments. Adaptive computing allows customers to run applications as services on any shared computing resource at any time, reducing cost of ownership by up to 40 percent. The enhancements from SAP allow companies using both SAP NetWeaver and Microsoft operating systems to run multiple instances of enterprise software or databases on the same server through “virtualization” of applications from hardware resources. With more than 50 percent of SAP applications running on the Microsoft platform, this extension doubles the reach of application virtualization to thousands of mutual SAP and Microsoft customers. The announcement was made at the CeBIT 2006 trade fair, being held in Hanover, Germany, March 9-15.

Lower Costs and Greater Scalability for Current and Future Projects
“Customers are on a treadmill of complexity and cost that limits the value IT delivers to the business,” said Zane Adam, director, Windows Server Division at Microsoft Corp. “Virtualization is a key technology to help liberate IT but must be implemented as part of a broad approach of enabling self-managing dynamic systems. Together with SAP, we have taken a large step forward in our effort to help customers lower their total cost of ownership and allow for greater innovation within their business. This type of adaptive computing will enable a cost effective deployment model for our mutual customers.”

By making its adaptive computing capabilities available on Microsoft operating systems, SAP is allowing companies to virtualize not only current applications and databases, such as mySAP™ Business Suite and Microsoft SQL Server, for lower costs and scalability, but also new products from SAP and its partner ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs). Due to the adaptive computing capability of the SAP NetWeaver platform, applications need not be re-written or modified in any way. Application virtualization is code free, independent of application design, available out of the box, and certified to run any current or future application on all tested configurations.

SAP’s Open Partner Ecosystem
Today’s announcement demonstrates SAP’s commitment to work closely with its technology partners to ensure customers have the widest possible choice of operating systems, servers and storage technologies. SAP formed the Adaptive Computing Council (ACC) in 2003 as an open forum for proactive information exchange and ongoing collaboration between SAP and its ACC partners. As part of this effort, SAP and its partners abide by a two-level quality assurance code that covers compliance testing and interface certification for adaptive computing, ensuring a robust, tightly-integrated customer solution.

“This is another powerful example of successful, customer-driven collaboration between SAP and Microsoft, following Project Mendocino, the first joint-product initiative between SAP and Microsoft,” said Ori Inbar, senior vice president of Solution Marketing for SAP NetWeaver, SAP AG. “There is a large universe of customers who use both Microsoft .NET and SAP NetWeaver. It was crucial that both companies work together to enhance flexibility and make system management easier. The collaboration between SAP and its ecosystem is allowing customers to save on IT costs and deploy their savings to increase innovation across their lines of business.”