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Enterprise Customers Choose Microsoft Platform to Run SAP Applications for High-Performance, Multiterabyte Scalability and Low TCO


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Microsoft announces Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 Certification for SAP Business Suite 7, and new enterprise support and services.

REDMOND, Wash. — Today Microsoft Corp. announced the recent certification of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 to fully support SAP NetWeaver 7.0 and the newly released SAP Business Suite 7. The certification further demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to deliver world-class enterprise capabilities and to help customers take advantage of the latest innovations through joint Microsoft and SAP development.

“We’ve migrated a large number of SAP systems to the Microsoft platform with a high level of customer satisfaction and measurable business value,” said Ralph Jacobus, president and CEO at RealTech Inc., a global consulting firm specializing in the Microsoft and SAP technical platform. “In particular, we see immense benefits for our customers to move to the Microsoft platform given the substantial enhancements that Microsoft has introduced into each product, such as virtualization through Hyper-V, and data and backup compression in SQL Server 2008. As we’ve seen database sizes continue to increase, Microsoft innovation combined with the attractive price point provides much lower total cost of ownership for our enterprise customers.”

Microsoft and SAP have a long history of delivering outstanding solutions to enterprise customers in a wide range of industries. More than 65,000 SAP installations run on Windows — more than all other platforms combined — and almost two-thirds of all new SAP installations are deployed on Windows. This includes customers such as QR Limited and Kimball International Inc., which have migrated to Microsoft’s platform, realizing higher performance, higher overall value and efficiencies.

“Microsoft’s application platform, including SQL Server and Windows Server, provides availability that is equal to or superior to what we experienced on IBM DB2 and the mainframe,” said Tim Robinson, SAP Basis manager at QR Limited, an Australian-based passenger train and freight train company. “We are managing 1 terabyte of data, and seeing 20 percent to 40 percent faster SAP transactional response times and up to eight times faster batch processing since moving SAP to SQL Server. Plus, if we had kept our SAP applications and databases on the mainframe, it would have required additional mainframe capacity that would have cost us about $100,000 a month.”

Kimball International Inc., a manufacturer of furniture and electronic assemblies, is also realizing benefits by migrating from an Oracle/UNIX-based environment to the Windows platform with SAP. “Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server products provide the processing power we need to manage our largest database of 3.5 terabytes,” said Ken Kemker, director of enterprise architecture at Kimball International. “With the Microsoft platform we are seeing 30 percent to 50 percent more processing power, achieved ROI within six to 12 months, and have seen a combined hardware and software savings of $450,000 annually.”

SABMiller RUS is a Russian subsidiary of SABMiller, plc, one of the world’s largest brewers, with brewing interests and distribution agreements across six continents. For SABMiller RUS, rapid company growth caused an increase in the number of business applications used as well as requirements for extreme fault tolerance and reliability. As a result, SABMiller RUS found it necessary to optimize its datacenter infrastructure in order to make IT more responsive to business needs, speed up new application deployment, and save on equipment purchases and service costs. “The virtualization project based on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V technology helped us reduce our infrastructure costs by 48 percent, and our expected return on investment is 234 percent,” said Nina Tatsiy, IS manager at SABMiller RUS. “We now use 10 times fewer physical servers to run SAP’s portal than we would need in a purely physical environment.”

To help customers optimize their hardware and software infrastructure, the new HP Microsoft Virtualization Infrastructure Service offerings provide customers with technical resources, prescriptive guidance and best practices. These services include virtualization strategy, consolidation, virtual machine management and security, and are designed to enable virtualized implementations of SAP Business Suite 7 and other critical business applications.

“Microsoft and SAP continue to offer customers excellent value through our continued innovation in enterprise-class software solutions,” said Dan Neault, general manager of SQL Server product marketing at Microsoft. “The benefits of running SAP solutions on the Microsoft Application Platform continue to increase, offering customers proven scalability, performance and reliability for their most demanding workloads at one of the best costs and value in the industry.”

In addition to providing software that meets the needs of enterprise customers, Microsoft Services also recently announced worldwide availability of Premier Mission Critical Support, a new Premier Support add-on specifically designed to deliver enhanced support for mission-critical solutions. Through Premier Mission Critical Support, Microsoft will provide its customers with guaranteed response times backed by financial credits, round-the-clock access to expertise and prioritized access to product development teams. Premier Mission Critical Support currently covers Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2005 SP2 and SP3, and SQL Server 2008 components of a mission-critical solution.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

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