Projects Include Enterprise Collaboration, SOA Management, Disaster
Recovery for SAP Environments, Real-Time Reporting and Business Performance
Improvement
PALO ALTO, Calif., June 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP)
today announced multiple ground-breaking projects coming out of the SAP
Co-Innovation Lab, located at the SAP campus in Palo Alto, California.
Among the projects that are being created and developed in the lab are a
private online collaboration workspace, support for enterprise
service-oriented architecture (SOA) management, a disaster recovery
solution, a real-time reporting solution for manufacturers, and solutions
that help companies improve business performance. Established in June 2007
with support from founding sponsors HP, Intel Corporation, NetApp and
Cisco, the SAP Co-Innovation Lab is a hands-on working environment for SAP,
its customers and partners to build and execute joint projects, enabling
them to co-innovate new business applications and technology solutions to
address specific customer needs.
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SAP Fosters Co-Innovation Through Private Enterprise Collaboration
Today's social collaboration tools provide readily available and easily
accessible platforms for shared communications, but do not provide the
governance and layered access required for business communications. In an
effort to address this need, one of the leading projects developed in the
SAP Co-Innovation Lab is the collaboration workspace from SAP. The
workspace provides Web 2.0 infrastructure -- such as blogs, wikis and
online forums -- with built-in governance for all companies to participate
and collaborate in real time within a secure business network community.
The collaboration workspace from SAP provides customers, system
integrators, technology partners and independent software partners within
the SAP ecosystem a secure online environment to collaborate and foster
virtual interaction, while protecting intellectual property assets and
tightly managing access levels and authorized information sharing.
The collaboration workspace is enabling 13 different programs at SAP to
be more effective and efficient, bringing together more than 3,700 expert
users from more than 275 companies, participating in more than 200 unique
workspaces. Users include partners and customers participating in SAP's
communities of innovation, including the Enterprise Services Community, the
Business Process Expert community and the SAP Co-Innovation Lab itself.
"The collaboration workspace from SAP is a powerful, new tool -- and
has brought an important additional dimension to Procter & Gamble's
engagement in SAP's ecosystem," said Dietmar Giljohann, initiative manager,
Order Acquisition, Procter & Gamble. "We're happy to see SAP's leadership
around projects like this in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, producing tangible
results that benefit the whole ecosystem."
SAP Ecosystem Tackles Opportunities in Enterprise SOA Management
Enterprise service-oriented architecture provides opportunities for
customers to better align IT and business to achieve higher levels of
business agility. SAP customers benefit from the visibility and control
they achieve by managing the runtime aspects of their composite SOA
applications. With an effective management infrastructure, these customers
can enforce policies, manage service-level agreements and secure loosely
coupled systems that span departments and extend to partners. Members of
the SAP Co-Innovation Lab are working together to optimize these SOA
runtime management capabilities for SAP enterprise services. To achieve
this goal, customers and partners are working with SAP to define key
real-world scenarios that are tested and evaluated in the lab. The results
will enable the publishing of best practices for customers and partners
around SOA-based policy management and enforcement, including in
high-volume scenarios. Among the first technology firms supporting SOA
management projects in the lab are AmberPoint and Sonoa Systems, both
backed by SAP Ventures, and SOA Software.
"The SAP ecosystem, and the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in particular, have
been a great asset as we shape our SOA adoption strategy," said Barney
Sene, CTO, Ingram Micro. "Since SAP works directly with other companies
whose products we've invested in, like SOA Software, we can get clearer,
more aligned direction from both parties on topics like SOA management and
operational governance. We also have access to implementation insights that
have been thought through for the long haul in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab."
SAP Teams With VMware and NetApp to Simplify Disaster Recovery
Since SAP solutions are considered mission-critical to the daily
operation of many businesses, these companies are constantly on the lookout
for disaster recovery plans to ensure that their SAP solutions are back
online quickly and reliably in the event of a system failure. However, many
companies find that the formalized disaster recovery plans available today
are expensive, time-intensive and difficult to implement. With a goal of
addressing this business need, SAP teamed with VMware and NetApp in the SAP
Co-Innovation Lab to work together on an automated and cost-effective
disaster recovery offering for SAP implementations.
The goal of this project was to help companies lower the cost of
maintaining a disaster recovery program, and to simplify the disaster
recovery process and increase its reliability. Using VMware Site Recovery
Manager and NetApp storage solutions, this project explored solutions for
simplifying the previously complex disaster recovery steps by providing
automated disaster recovery testing procedures and offering the option of
automated daily disaster recovery tests. The results demonstrated the
ability to improve recovery time from days to hours or minutes, and improve
recovery point objectives from 24 hours to one hour or less.
Cisco and SAP Collaborate to Address "Borderless Manufacturing"
Today's manufacturers frequently operate across several different
geographies, often in far-flung locations, and require instant and accurate
visibility across their supply chains. SAP has teamed with Cisco in the SAP
Co-Innovation Lab to explore solutions that help enable manufacturers to
share and deliver with industry-leading security key performance indicators
(KPIs) and production data across plants. Taking advantage of the SAP(R)
Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) application and the
Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) from Cisco, the project
simulated near-real-time reporting from a vendor or customer manufacturing
facility.
The project included several different demonstration scenarios that
support the vision of "borderless manufacturing" for inventory and KPI
metric collaboration across a manufacturer's worldwide locations. The
results of the project provided manufacturers with the ability to interact
with vendors' inventory systems in a controlled environment, access to
real-time messaging and collaboration with vendors -- all supported by
Web-based entry that is accessible from anywhere within a manufacturer's
network.
SAP, Business Objects and Deloitte Consulting LLP Help Businesses
Improve Corporate Performance
Many companies today lack a comprehensive solution to manage corporate
performance across the enterprise. They are often faced with information
silos that prevent them from making informed business and execution
decisions that can impact financial performance. To address this business
need, SAP and Business Objects, an SAP company, are collaborating with
Deloitte Consulting LLP (Deloitte Consulting) through the SAP Co-Innovation
Lab to create industry and market-specific service offerings that help
companies in their efforts to close the loop between strategy and
execution. The collaboration will showcase service offerings that combine
SAP solutions for governance, risk and compliance (GRC), enterprise
performance management (EPM) and the Business Objects business intelligence
(BI) platform with Deloitte Consulting's thought leadership in performance
improvement applications and industry consulting experience, knowledge and
skills. The companies are working together to demonstrate that customers
can benefit from integrated GRC, EPM and BI solutions to enable more
effective decision-making and to improve business performance across the
enterprise.
The demonstrations hosted in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab will show how
companies can adaptively change corporate strategy and launch campaigns
dynamically in response to market and competitive risks. The advantage to
customers is to be able to embed risk management into operational processes
and to continually monitor and adjust a company's performance against
strategy.
"Software vendors are relying more on their partner networks to expand
into new markets and provide competitive advantage to their customers and
partners," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal, Enterprise Applications
Consulting. "SAP has clearly taken a leadership position in this regard by
leveraging its ecosystem to collaborate and develop new solutions with its
customers and partners. The interactions between customers and partners
enabled by the SAP Co-Innovation Lab are proof that SAP understands the
value of placing its customers at the center of innovation."
SAP Co-Innovation Lab Showcases the Power of the SAP Ecosystem
Along with the development of ground-breaking projects, the SAP
Co-Innovation Lab also supports other collaboration-rich activities. The
lab hosts a series of seminars and Webinars, thought leadership forums, and
onsite and online collaborations with SAP and other industry leaders. The
lab offers high-impact demonstrations and solution showcases with onsite
and online access, providing a rich customer experience. The lab also helps
to lower the cost of innovation by enabling close cooperation with partners
and customers, and by providing a simulated heterogeneous and full-featured
data center. (For comments from partners, see addendum quote sheet at
http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.aspx?pressID=9668.)
"These examples show how the SAP Co-Innovation Lab is providing a
completely new type of collaboration platform for the industry's top minds
to work together on the most pressing business challenges our customers
face today," said Zia Yusuf, executive vice president, Global Ecosystem and
Partner Group, SAP. "Our mutual customers stand to gain substantial
benefits, as the work done at the lab pulls together the SAP ecosystem to
address the right problem at the right time with a real, tangible solution.
The combined efforts of SAP and its customer-focused ecosystem are
continuing to deliver on the promises of co-innovation, collaboration, and
thought leadership."
About SAP
SAP is the world's leading provider of business software(*), offering
applications and services that enable companies of all sizes and in more
than 25 industries to become best-run businesses. With more than 47,800
customers (excludes customers from the acquisition of Business Objects) in
over 120 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including
the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE, under the symbol "SAP." (For more
information, visit http://www.sap.com)
(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource
planning and related applications.
Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts
are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities
Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe,"
"estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project,"
"predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to
SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP
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reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their
dates.
Copyright (C) 2008 SAP AG. All rights reserved.
SAP, R/3, mySAP, mySAP.com, xApps, xApp, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP
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United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727)
For more information, press only:
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SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT;
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CONTACT:
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