SAP Enhances SAP® Solution Manager to Drive New Value for Customers

Central Application Management Platform Offers Up-to-the-Minute Visibility, Continuous Update Processes and Cost Reductions

WALLDORF, Germany - July 25, 2006 - Underlining its commitment to provide exceptional service, value and support for its customers, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced enhancements to its application management platform, SAP® Solution Manager, offering customers improved processes and tools for managing their SAP landscapes. The enhancements to SAP Solution Manager strengthen its role as the central IT value driver for SAP customers, helping them gain optimal governance, control and traceability of their entire maintenance management process while significantly lowering the cost of implementing and running SAP applications. In addition to improving service processes for existing installations, the enhancement sets the stage for an application management infrastructure designed to support the changing service needs of customers as they migrate to enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA).

Available free of charge for SAP customers that have licensed mySAP™ Business Suite applications, as well as mySAP™ All-in-One and SAP® Business One, SAP Solution Manager serves as a dashboard that enables companies to increase software reliability and enhance technical support for all aspects of their deployments. Providing tools, integrated content, services and best practices from SAP, this centralized platform helps customers implement, operate and monitor applications with optimal visibility across the entire SAP landscape. It helps customers reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) while enabling CIOs to sharpen focus on leveraging software to drive business process innovation.

Service and Support Infrastructure Built for the SAP Product Road Map
Available January 2007, SAP Solution Manager will be the primary source for maintenance updates, which then still can be delivered over the SAP Service Marketplace in parallel. Starting April 2007, SAP Solution Manager will be the only source from which customers receive maintenance updates for mySAP Business Suite 2005 applications and beyond. It can also serve as the source for maintenance updates for earlier releases of SAP components.

The release 4.0 of SAP Solution Manager will offer significant enhancements for maintenance processes and activities, such as:

End-to-end and fully pre-configured maintenance management process
Planning and deployment dashboard for all maintenance-related activities
Source for all support packages provided by SAP as part of customers’ maintenance agreements.
Customers who are using the 3.2 release of SAP Solution Manager and receiving maintenance from SAP can also receive an enhancement as part of maintenance that allows them to run a limited set of the new maintenance optimization features.

In addition to the extensive functionality in SAP Solution Manager supporting the entire software life cycle, the new maintenance features pave the way for companies transitioning their IT from traditional architecture to leverage services-based architecture. The features are designed to help companies efficiently transition to an enterprise SOA, while meeting their immediate goals and demands for optimizing returns on their IT investments. Standardization and streamlining of support processes is a necessary step to prepare the customer’s support organization.

According to a recent AMR Research study, SAP Solution Manager is fundamental for SAP customers to streamline their support and maintenance processes.

“With the expense of post go-live maintenance and support representing up to 80 percent of current operational budgets and up to 40 percent of total life-cycle costs, companies must carefully manage their enterprise applications throughout their long-term life cycle in order to squeeze costs and maximize business benefits,” said Derek Prior, research director, AMR. “The payback is clear: Greater automation of the underlying operations processes can typically translate to a reduction in overall labor cost or higher operations team efficiency.”

End-to End Solution Maintenance Management
The maintenance enhancements will further strengthen an already proven application management tool that SAP continues to optimize for its customers. (See related press release from March 9, 2006, titled “SAP Sharpens Application Management Tool to Help Customers Easily Master Their IT Environments.”) They allow companies to manage their software environments centrally while handling both ABAP and Java-based maintenance software packages. This centralized and proactive control of SAP applications provides organizations with maximum control of risk in implementations and operations. SAP Solution Manager governs the technical implementation process, allowing companies to establish reliable change control within their support organization to easily comply with external regulations. Among the benefits of the current release, SAP Solution Manager offers:

Process standardization and harmonization across organizations and locations
Management and acceleration of the implementation and upgrade of business processes
End-to-end diagnostic capabilities to monitor a complete system landscape
“The new maintenance optimization capabilities are a milestone in our continuous effort to broaden the extensive support offering provided by SAP Solution Manager, combining ease-of use with functional depth and best-in-class compliance features,” said Uwe Hommel, executive vice president, SAP Active Global Support. “SAP Solution Manager further simplifies the management of patches for the customer’s SAP support staff and helps to reduce maintenance costs. This step re-affirms our overall service and support strategy with SAP Solution Manager as the key customer-facing support tool aiming to provide maximum benefit to our customers every day.”

About SAP
SAP is the world’s leading provider of business software*. Today, more than 34,600 customers in more than 120 countries run SAP® applications—from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small and midsize enterprises to suite offerings for global organizations. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver® platform to drive innovation and enable business change, SAP software helps enterprises of all sizes around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. SAP solution portfolios support the unique business processes of more than 25 industries, including high tech, retail, financial services, healthcare and the public sector. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol “SAP.” (Additional information at http://www.sap.com)

(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning and related applications such as supply chain management, customer relationship management, product life-cycle management and supplier relationship management.

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “expect,” “forecast,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “project,” “predict,” “should” and “will” and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations The factors that could affect SAP’s future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including SAP’s most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

Copyright © 2006 SAP AG. All rights reserved.
SAP, R/3, mySAP, mySAP.com, xApps, xApp, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all over the world. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data contained in this document serve informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary.

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SAP

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