We are just returning from SAP SAPPHIRE in Orlando and would like to share some of our experiences and impressions.
Given the economic climate and the flu, the overall attendance was a bit down from the previous year. I believe Leo Apotheker (SAP CEO) talked about 10.000 participants, plus 8.000 attendees on the web. But while the drop was noticeable in the overall traffic, the discussions were excellent. First of all, we had more time for much more in-depth conversations with customers and partners. We heard about new customer successes and talked (and listened) to new customers who are considering implementing SAP on VMware. Interestingly, while customer discussions until last year were more focused on support and core functionality, now they generally center around how VMware software can be leveraged more strategically in SAP environments. It is good to see that the thoughts are heading towards the SLA-driven SAP datacenter, very similar to what Dr. Krips (Sr. VP, SAP Managed Services) talked about in his keynote in Cannes (see also: SAP Managed Services Keynote at VMworld Europe). Correspondingly, also the overall partner community mindset has clearly moved from “This is interesting, let us see how we can make this work in a few engagements,” which we often encountered in previous years, to “This is our VMware strategy – how can we best work together?”. Very nice progress indeed. In light of this, it was very good timing that we had this year also our first breakout session at SAP SAPPHIRE/ASUG (with Mike Somers of Dow Chemical – see discussion below).
Most importantly however, it has become clear that SAP has discovered virtualization as a critical area. Virtualization and cloud computing were highlighted in three keynotes, including those of Leo Apotheker and Hasso Plattner.
Leo Apotheker talked about virtualization in the context of Timeless Software. Timeless Software enables customers to take advantage of new technologies and developments in a non-disruptive manner:
It is very much self-evident (and always has been for you and us) that virtualization and cloud computing support a concept of this type extremely well by making the compute infrastructure supporting the business processes flexible and scalable, and allowing it to be easily upgraded without disruption. We are glad to see that SAP sees the synergies here as well.
Hasso Plattner talked mostly about in-memory databases, which was extremely(!) interesting by the way. From my layman’s view, this approach opens up completely new possibilities in terms of what you can do with your data. And the demos were very, very cool as well. However, Hasso also briefly talked about virtualization and cloud computing, and how they support today’s and tomorrow’s computing needs for businesses. The picture below visualizes this nicely.
On the opening day, Stefan Kneis, who heads up SAP's Global Customer User Groups, showed a screen shot of the SAP Adaptive Computing Controller interfacing with VMware- (and Xen-) virtualized SAP landscapes (see also News on the SAP Adaptive Computing Controller: Integration with VMware Infrastructure), using it as an example of how SAP works with the partner ecosystem.
VMware participated in the second event of the SAP Green IT Community. One always needs to be a bit careful in terms of what to expect from these communities in actual output, but this one seems very promising, as it connects customers, service partners, software partners, and hardware partners with the goal of delivering end-to-end energy savings for SAP customers. And it is output-focused, so stay tuned.
Last but most certainly not least, there were excellent customer sessions. Mike Somers of Dow Chemical did a great job explaining how Dow Chemical uses VMware virtualization in its SAP datacenter (and I added a few details around VMware’s products and strategy in the SAP space). Dow now has about 200 SAP VMs, and they haven’t even migrated all of their apps to their new NEA operating platform. Also, Jeroen van Hemel (VP of Operations at Infonet, Netherlands) discussed their architecture leveraging Suse Enterprise Linux and VMware virtualization. See this video for more details.
So overall SAP SAPPHIRE was quite exciting for us, and an excellent continuation of the SAP Virtualization Week three weeks ago (more to come on this as well).
Joachim