April, 2009

What does SAP have to say about the Oracle-Sun deal?

You can always count on SAP executive Bill McDermott to give a piece of his mind on what SAP often refers to as its “next largest competitor.”

So when I even mentioned Oracle yesterday during an interview on SAP’s first quarter earnings, he gladly launched into his take on Oracle’s recent Sun acquisition unprompted.

 ”I think they have introduced a tremendous level of risk into their business model by making this wild foray into hardware,” McDermott said. “They know nothing about hardware and now they’ve made a move into the hardware business.”

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Easing your fears of SAP virtualization support

Support has been one of the biggest issues surrounding SAP virtualization, especially when it comes to moving mission-critical applications to virtual environments.

Typically, when there’s a problem with a virtualized application the application vendor will tell the IT shop it must uninstall the application from its virtual environment and move it to a physical setup to isolate the fault, according to this article on SearchServerVirtualization.com.

To that end, one of the most interesting presentations during SAP Virtualization Week was from Rick Scherer, a virtual infrastructure architect with the City of San Diego — who shed some light on this issue.

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Going green kicks off SAP Virtualization week

SAP announced an interesting initiative today — the Green IT community.

Dozens of SAP customers and partners will work together to research and develop sustainable software. Customers such as Colgate and partners like VMware, Citrix and Sun (SAP said it’s too early to tell if Oracle’s acquisition will affect Sun’s plans for participation) will lead the charge. Click here for a full list of participants.

SAP will start benchmarking the efficiency of its own software by determining how much energy it will consume. In turn, it’s asking partners to provide the same information on their products.

Plus, SAP offered an open invitation to any partners or customers who want to join the Green IT community. All they have to do is email GreenIT@SAP.com for more information.

“From a customer perspective, it’s a great way to become an early adopter of solutions and then to go and deploy those solutions,” said Peter Graf, who was named SAP’s first chief sustainability officer in March.

And thus SAP kicked off Virtualization Week, being held in Palo Alto, with a theme that it has continued to push over the last couple of months — green IT.

“For me, the natural first step in green IT is virtualization,” Graf said.

But why deploy these initiatives now? Graf elicited a few chuckles from the crowd when he remarked that even the mention of “green IT” had some participants nodding off. So he focused on a crowd pleaser — cost savings.

Graf put up numbers from an SAP customer that reduced its application servers from 218 to 116, and saved $714,000 on maintenance, $162,000 on facilities, $1,468 on staff and $13,520 on servers — reducing its total costs by 36%. 

And he said SAP itself has virtualized half of its servers.

“We’re doing it because it makes fundamental business sense,” Graf said. “This technology works. We are now virtualizing across the board at SAP.”

Industry analyst Joshua Greenbaum wrote an excellent blog last month when SAP made its sustainability efforts public on just why the vendor could really convince the world that this was important.

Using the virtualization conference to talk about sustainability is a smart move — as it links green IT more to cost savings than to some sort of abstract idea. It’ll be interesting to see what SAP does with this initiative at Sapphire.

SAP to NetSuite: “Impact on our business is negligible”

 NetSuite’s latest attempt to poach customers from SAP finally struck a nerve with the enterprise software giant, which Tuesday offered its point of view on the SaaS vendor’s new Suite Cloud offering for SAP customers.

 NetSuite is trying to gain business from subsidiaries of large SAP customers by offering them SaaS ERP, along with packaged integrations to tie the software into the main SAP back-end. Moreover, customers have the option of deploying just one piece of NetSuite’s software, such as general ledger.

 Yet, SAP’s not worried about NetSuite affecting its business, according to spokesman Bill Wohl. “The potential of NetSuite having an impact on our business is negligible at this point,” he said. Wohl even poked fun at NetSuite’s viability by asking, “will they be [another] acquisition candidate of Oracle?” (Oracle CEO Larry Ellison owns a majority stake in NetSuite, and it has yet to take similar jabs at Oracle.)

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