SAP and Novell’s open source initiative cuts TCO

At BrainShare 2008 SAP and Novell announced that they are taking their relationship to the next level and are making SAP enterprise applications compatible with Linux Enterprise in an attempt to satisfy the open source crowd. The companies intend to:

• Optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP’s data center infrastructure requirements.
• Further promote SAP Business All-in-One solutions based on SUSE Linux Enterprise.
• Collaborate within the SAP Enterprise Services Community program to help strengthen customers related to the SAP governance, risk and compliance (GRC) practices.

In theory, this will simplify SAP deployments for companies by allowing mission-critical operations to be run on Linux and effectively reduce TCO. The need for this initiative was explained briefly by Léo Apotheker, deputy CEO, of SAP, who pointed to customer demand for Linux as a core platform.

SAP also mentioned the importance of Linux Enterprise in conjunction with SAP All-In-One and Business ByDesign, thus clearly stressing that the midmarket is a target.

Eric Samuels, Assistant Editor