Palo Alto, Calif. - April 9, 2008 - Continuing its strong tradition of ecosystem co-innovation, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the formation of the enterprise virtualization community. Uniting leading technology vendors including AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, Intel Corporation, NetApp, Novell, Red Hat, Sun and VMware, the community aims to develop new strategies for business process-driven virtualization¹ to help companies cut costs while increasing efficiencies. The enterprise virtualization community was launched during SAP Virtualization Week 2008, being held April 7-10 at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto, California.

Enterprises today face the dual challenge of managing both increasingly complex computing environments and the growing demand for IT to enable business agility and success. The enterprise virtualization community is designed to help SAP customers address these issues by providing them with an open and multifaceted approach to align business processes with virtualization products and technologies from SAP ecosystem partners. This advisory group for virtualization was initiated by SAP within the Enterprise Services Community, a cross-industry program enabling partners and customers to help shape the way software is developed and deployed to solve evolving business requirements.

"When I'm speaking with customers, virtualization is discussed in almost every meeting," said Vishal Sikka, chief technology officer, SAP. "Companies are looking at how to best take advantage of virtualization technology today and in the future, while customers are constantly evaluating their existing infrastructure and application investments. They know that leveraging virtual environments is critical for cost savings and to drive efficiencies. Today, SAP is breaking ground by leveraging the power and innovation of the ecosystem and bringing together these important virtualization vendors to assist companies in optimizing business processes in virtualized environments."

Since 2003, SAP has been working with partners to enable SAP® solutions to run in virtualized environments. The adaptive computing capabilities of the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform allow customers to maximize their existing hardware investments and centralize management of SAP applications across virtual environments. For SAP customers, virtualization is helping reduce the cost of running hardware dedicated to SAP applications by as much as 70 percent. (See September 21, 2005 announcement, titled "Adaptive Computing Capabilities from SAP Drive Down IT Costs to Fund Business Process Innovation." See below for further related announcements.) The enterprise virtualization community is designed to help customers deploy business process-driven virtualization, enabling business process experts to design new processes that run in virtualized environments using modeling techniques-without having to know any details about virtualization.

The comprehensive range of industry vendors participating in the community reflects the fact that enterprises are virtualizing their environments on many levels: network, CPU, server, storage and desktop. (For comments from community members, see addendum quote sheet at http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.aspx?pressID=9298.) SAP NetWeaver, the industry-leading technology platform, is integrated with the infrastructure of each vendor's offerings. Existing relationships with these vendors-along with the company's commitment to enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) and fostering a thriving ecosystem of customers, partners and individuals-positions SAP to take enterprise virtualization to the next level-from the infrastructure to the business level.

"Virtualization continues to offer great infrastructure agility and cost containment benefits, but to take the technology to the next level will require not only a well-defined implementation road map, but also partners that can extend these attributes to customer business process challenges," said John Humphreys, program vice president, IDC Enterprise Platform Group. "The enterprise virtualization community is a great first step toward bringing the IT community together to deliver on these promises."

"VMware and SAP have a strong partnership to deliver superior SAP implementations for customers," said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. "VMware is the only virtualization platform certified and supported by SAP for both Windows- and Linux-based applications in production environments. We look forward to accelerating the uptake of a new generation of enterprise SOA business applications from SAP with the benefits of VMware virtualization. Joint customers can experience dramatically lower total cost of ownership of their datacenter infrastructure, higher application uptime and reliability, improved productivity, strengthened security and a greener carbon footprint."

SAP customers are especially enthusiastic about the community:

"Virtualization technologies are a key component of Colgate-Palmolive's application infrastructure architecture and they help to drive our operational effectiveness," said Arthur Fleiss, IT architect, Colgate-Palmolive. "We are excited about SAP's enterprise virtualization community and look forward to working with them and their partners on driving a more cohesive, less fractured vision."