What’s SAP building with Vblocks?

Overheard at EMC World this week — CEO Joe Tucci mentioned they’ll make some kind of Vblock/SAP announcement at Sapphire next week.

Sources say the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition (EMC, VMware and Cisco) will make an announcement about running SAP on its Vblock Infrastructure Packages. Vblocks are preconfigured bundles of servers, virtualization, networking and storage for enterprises that want to build private clouds.

There’s no point in moving to a private cloud if you can’t bring your applications with you, the sources said. This partnership is supposed to make it easier to run SAP applications on Vblocks.

I asked SAP about this, they told me to wait until next week for more information.

Yet, we can surmise that this is an effort to coax more customers into running private clouds, and a way for SAP to sell its Business Suite software in a “cloudier” model.

Private clouds would offer many of the benefits of a true SaaS application. A private cloud meets the “flexibility” needs that businesses who seek SaaS talk about. They would save on infrastructure costs — quickly provisioning resources and deprovisioning them, adding more capacity at certain times of the year when more is needed and scale it back when it isn’t.

But it will be interesting to hear how SAP positions this. Vblocks make the most sense for “greenfield environments,” according to reporting by SearchServerVirtualization.com, as organizations with applications in place obviously don’t want to rip and replace what they already have and build from the ground up.

Will this fit into SAP’s on-demand strategy?