SAP Unveils Co-Innovation Lab in Silicon Valley

Lab to Offer Hands-on Environment for Collaborative Work With Partners and Customers Around Enterprise SOA

PALO ALTO, Calif. — SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the opening of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab at SAP Labs U.S. in Palo Alto, Calif. With a strong history of co-innovation, SAP has been a forerunner in building a vibrant ecosystem, supporting an open platform and fostering communities of customers, partners and individuals that collaborate to solve industry-specific business issues for customers. The SAP Co-Innovation Lab will offer a hands-on environment for SAP, independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs) and technology partners to work together with customers around current and future technologies, and to showcase how customers can increase competitive advantage and improve efficiencies by transforming their business networks with enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA). Founding sponsors of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab include Cisco, HP, Intel and NetApp. The announcement was made during SAP’s Silicon Valley Week, being held in Palo Alto, California, June 6-8.

The SAP Co-Innovation Lab will provide an efficient work environment for joint projects and will feature a simulated heterogeneous data center incorporating hardware and infrastructure software from the various participating vendors. To accurately simulate what is needed to support enterprise SOA effectively, the lab will re-create real-world performance and security required for Web-enabled and Internet/intranet-accessible business applications.

“The opening of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab exemplifies the tremendous power of the SAP ecosystem and is a physical manifestation of how SAP is truly engaging partners and customers in joint collaboration,” said Zia Yusuf, executive vice president, Global Ecosystem and Partner Group, SAP. “We’ve established this lab as a trail-blazing facility for ISVs, SIs, technology vendors and customers to come together to exchange ideas and develop the next generation of innovations that customers need to run their businesses as efficiently and effectively as possible. We are pleased Cisco, HP, Intel, NetApp and our ecosystem of partners stand behind this vision.”

Sponsors of the lab will participate in joint projects with ISVs, systems integrators and other technology vendors, and also will collaborate with SAP to develop solution blueprints to help customers create data center environments optimized to support enterprise SOA. ISVs and SIs will leverage the lab to collaborate with SAP and customers around enterprise SOA, as well as have the opportunity to test and demonstrate their products in an IT environment that supports heterogeneous systems based on the open standards that customers demand today. Callidus Software, Novell, Questra and Wonderware are among the first ISVs signing on to initiate projects in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab.

Technology vendors will leverage the lab to optimize their infrastructure products for SAP customers and ensure that their offerings simplify customer adoption of enterprise SOA. Citrix Systems and F5 are among the first infrastructure partners committing to initiate projects in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab.

“SAP and Cisco are committed to helping customers realize the full potential of their IT investment and enable technology to transform their business,” said Bill Ruh, vice president of Advanced Services, Cisco Systems. “Critical to achieving this value is the convergence of application and IT infrastructures. The SAP Co-Innovation Lab is a valuable resource for our customers to witness the potential of their overall IT investment while assuming best practices in their deployments.”

“This announcement enhances our long-standing relationship with SAP by leveraging elements of HP’s Business Technology portfolio with SAP’s evolving product and service offerings for enterprise SOA,” said Ron Eller, vice president and general manager of Enterprise Solutions Alliances, HP. “The collaboration will create a future generation of highly agile and adaptable solutions that provide better business outcomes for our customers.”

“We have a long and mutually beneficial relationship with SAP that is always focused on delivering inventive technologies and computing solutions to the marketplace as fast as possible,” said Elliot Garbus, general manager, Intel Corporation’s Developer Relations Division. “Being a founding sponsor of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab reflects this spirit, and will help SAP’s developers and customers accelerate the adoption of innovative technologies on Intel-based computers and our Core microarchitecture processors.”

“Helping SAP administrators rapidly implement robust storage infrastructures to easily scale with their business growth is what NetApp does best,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing, NetApp. “This initiative compliments what lies at the NetApp core—architectural simplicity and innovation. NetApp has a long history of innovation with SAP and we are pleased to be a founding sponsor of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab. NetApp looks forward to participating in key projects and solution blueprints such as virtualization within the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, helping customers to reduce complexity, accelerate their deployments and upgrades, and optimize their data center storage architecture to support enterprise SOA.”

The SAP Co-Innovation Lab builds on a successful pilot of a co-innovation facility in Silicon Valley for network vendors that ran from November 2006 to April 2007. The goal of the pilot facility was to give leading network vendors hands-on experience testing their products and services together with SAP applications, while SAP could explore ways to optimize the network performance of its enterprise SOA offerings. By expanding the concept and opening a hands-on co-innovation lab in the heart of Silicon Valley, SAP customers will benefit from reduced integration costs and faster innovation cycles.