SAP Fosters Open Ecosystem for Driving Customer Innovation

ORLANDO, Fla., June 4, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Working closely with an active open ecosystem, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) empowers customers, partners, startups and developers worldwide to innovate easily on top of the SAP HANA® platform. By fostering strategic collaborations with partners, including Red Hat, IBM, HP and VMware, as well as startups, SAP plans to offer customers broader choice, ease of deployment and simplified IT environments, empowering them to transform their businesses by leveraging the advanced capabilities of SAP HANA. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held June 3-5, 2014, in Orlando, Florida.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Now Certified for SAP HANA 
SAP has expanded the operating system options for SAP HANA by certifying it for production use on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including Intel Ivy Bridge support. This empowers customers to achieve business performance and innovation while retaining their choice of IT architectures.

Additionally, SAP plans to enable enterprises seeking to leverage the power of the public cloud for their data management needs to be able to take advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. SAP and Red Hat are collaborating with the aim that SAP licensees working on the AWS cloud would soon be able to consume Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA on demand.

"We are excited to collaborate with SAP to accelerate the adoption of SAP HANA by offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA," said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Platform Business Unit, Red Hat. "For the first time, SAP customers have a choice in operating system platforms for deploying real-time data management and application solutions."

SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems Test and Evaluation Program 
SAP and IBM continue to collaborate closely with the intent to enable SAP HANA to run on the IBM Power technology, including POWER7+ and the newly introduced POWER8 system on Linux. The companies ultimately aim to benefit customers that run their mission-critical SAP applications on IBM Power Systems. SAP and IBM today announced a limited test and evaluation program for SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems, allowing selected customers to test SAP HANA on IBM POWER Systems with Suse Linux, leveraging existing IT infrastructure investments while driving innovation using technologies such as SAP HANA.

"SAP and IBM have a long-standing successful technology partnership, and we are excited about extending that partnership with the Test and Evaluation Program for SAP HANA running on Linux on IBM Power Systems," said Doug Balog, general manager, Power Systems, IBM Corporation. "IBM Power Systems are built on an open server platform, designed from the ground up to handle massive amounts of data at unprecedented speed. We believe that this combination provides clients a catalyst for open innovation and the ability to transform into better run, data insights driven businesses."

HP Converged System 900 Now Certified for SAP HANA 
The new HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA has been certified by SAP and aims to deliver 12 terabytes of data in a single memory pool to power the most mission-critical business applications. The envisioned commercialization of this solution is the result of the HP and SAP co-innovation initiative called "Project Kraken." HP CS 900 for SAP HANA is intended to be a massively scalable system that aims to enable clients to manage and analyze extremely large and diverse data sets from a single system to facilitate real-time business decisions. The system's flexible configurations and high availability are envisioned to allow clients to consolidate mission-critical business applications to a centralized platform, helping reduce costs and simplifying the IT environment.

"Businesses are adopting SAP HANA to make real-time business decisions based on massive data sets, but are often constrained by their infrastructure's scalability and availability," said Tom Joyce, senior vice president and general manager, Converged Systems, HP. "With HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA, HP plans to help customers achieve business transformation with SAP HANA by delivering a system optimized for the largest, most mission-critical workloads."

SAP HANA on VMware vSphere® 5.5 Generally Available 
SAP HANA on VMware vSphere® 5.5 is now generally available for single virtual machine (VM) running on a dedicated SAP HANA certified server for production use. SAP is also releasing the scenario of multiple virtual machines on SAP HANA certified servers for production use as controlled availability. Customers are enabled to innovate and simplify their data centers helping achieve faster time to value, higher service levels and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

Startups Offer Solutions Powered by SAP HANA 
The SAP Startup Focus program aims to drive adoption of the SAP HANA platform outside of the traditional SAP ecosystem. The program provides startups with access to the technology, support and resources needed to build new applications or port existing applications on top of SAP HANA. Currently there are more than 1,500 startups participating, with more than 100 validated solutions across multiple industries available for SAP customers to evaluate and buy. This year, more than 20 customers have purchased the startup solutions, generating more than US$10 million in revenue for participating startups.

"Before we found out about the SAP Startup Focus program, we were skeptical partnering with a software giant like SAP. Now on the other side of the horizon, I am delighted to say what a smooth journey it has been, with the SAP team helping us navigate to the right people within the organization and making sure it's a win-win situation," said Dan Somers, founder and CEO, Warwick Analytics. "SAP HANA has empowered us to transform our root cause analysis proposition to manufacturing customers. We had an offline batch process, which took 36 hours to run; with SAP HANA, it runs within 35 seconds."

SAP HANA Marketplace 
The SAP HANA Marketplace site is an online platform and commerce ecosystem of customers, partners, startups and developers and a key part of SAP's cloud vision and execution. The site is a single destination for customers to discover, try and buy the SAP HANA platform as well as applications based on SAP HANA delivered by the SAP ecosystem. Customers can experience a wide range of solutions for their industry or line of business, from next-generation applications for marketing and supply chain to SAP HANA Cloud Platform, which can be purchased and accessed on a monthly subscription basis. SAP HANA Marketplace allows partners and developers to quickly publish their applications based on SAP HANA and manage their own online presence to monetize their innovations.

"SAP HANA Marketplace provides an effective and compelling proposition for solutions powered by SAP HANA and partners to reach the global SAP customer base," said Sanjiv Gupta, president and CEO, OpsVeda Inc. "It is efficient, low touch and ready for business."

For more information, including additional news and coverage from SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews and @SAPInMemory.

SAPPHIRE® NOW 
With SAPPHIRE® NOW, SAP offers customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, June 3-5, 2014, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and for news and coverage during the event, visit the SAP News Center at www.news-sap.com.

About SAP 
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 258,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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