MADRID, Nov. 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced significant new advances in the core areas of its cloud strategy: business network solutions, applications for lines of business, cloud platform development, online channels and virtualization. Customer adoption and partner success fuel these advancements to the SAP cloud portfolio. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd, being held as a co-located event in Madrid from November 8-10.

As cloud computing increasingly becomes a critical initiative for businesses of all sizes and across all industries, SAP is committed to bringing innovation and value to customers by leveraging its considerable assets. These include: business networks, platforms, online channel, applications and virtualization, all delivered as a service, thereby harnessing the paradigm shift in the marketplace, in an orchestrated way that offers real business value.

SAP Completes Crossgate Acquisition, Expanding Business Networking and Collaboration in the Cloud

SAP is now making it possible for organizations to connect, transact and collaborate with their customers and business partners through the cloud to enable real-time content and insights.

The recent acquisition of Crossgate, which closed on November 1, 2011, has produced new offerings for the SAP cloud portfolio, including the ability for SAP customers to connect electronically with tens of thousands of trading partners and extend a company’s business processes to its community. With Crossgate, SAP will provide customers with a 360-degree service if deployed entirely in the cloud. Participation in this business network will eliminate the need for costly point-to-point integration, helping reduce complexity today while enabling cost-effective scalability of the business network for the future.

SAP also announced planned enhancements to its social collaboration tool, the SAP StreamWork™ application. The company continues to deliver on its results-driven social enterprise strategy by marrying social and collaborative capabilities with a user’s business processes and systems to help ensure successful outcomes. For more information, see: “Business Analytics from SAP Moves to the Masses, Delivering Greater Value to Business Professionals.”

SAP Delivers a Technology Vision for the Future

SAP combines the unique trio of in-memory, cloud and mobility technology to drive the next-generation architecture of applications — both on premise and on demand — now and in the future. Customers and leading industry experts have validated this differentiated vision. The vision that SAP has laid out continues to evolve with the SAP HANA™ application cloud and project “River.”

Now in private beta, available to select customers by invitation only, the SAP HANA application cloud will provide a flexible and simple way for customers to reap the benefits of in-memory computing technology delivered via the cloud, at a lower cost. It is a new, in-memory, cloud-based platform that will power the next generation of cloud applications from SAP. Today, the SAP BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence (BI) OnDemand solution and Charitable Transformation (ChariTra), an online network that connects people to charitable causes, are powered by the SAP HANA application cloud. More applications are planned for availability as powered by SAP HANA in the coming months. The private beta is being conducted with a limited number of select customers and partners.

SAP is moving project “River” to private beta. “River” is one of the key components of its cloud application platform-as-a-service (PaaS), offering an environment for customers and partners to extend core applications and develop and deploy business applications in the cloud. “River” is an open-standards-based development platform that includes support for multiple popular language development frameworks, collaboration capabilities on which SAP StreamWork is built and a “River” definition language to specify applications that can be implemented in any container. This aims to enable all types of developers to use their existing skill sets to build cloud extensions to existing SAP applications and new cloud-native applications.

“With these new cloud innovations, we are consolidating and removing the layers, and making it much easier for customers to consume our applications,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology & Innovation, SAP AG. “By separating content from containers and making it much easier to move content around, across containers, we are delivering unbelievable efficiency in ways that weren’t possible before.”

Customers and Partners Rally Around Growing Cloud Application Portfolio from SAP

SAP Business ByDesign is showing maturity, with close to 1,000 customers globally, in which the average number of users per deployment is increasing steadily each quarter. New SAP Business ByDesign customers include R3D Consulting and subsidiary customers Velux (China) Co, Landi Renzo and Mahindra Satyam. To date there are over 200 resellers and 72 solution partners.

“We are both an SAP service partner and now a customer too,” said Bernard Roy, president and COO, R3D Consulting. “When we saw SAP Business ByDesign in action, we realized it was the perfect cloud solution to give us the backbone to support our rapidly growing business, from a company we already know and trust.”

SAP Business ByDesign now also expands mobile access to business processes via Microsoft Windows 7.5-powered mobile devices. Users can now access mobile apps integrated with SAP Business ByDesign such as sales, management approvals and reporting, and travel expense management. SAP partners can leverage this support to build mobile-accessible cloud applications integrated with SAP Business ByDesign by using the PaaS capabilities of the SAP ByDesign studio. SAP plans to continue to increase the breadth of mobile devices supported by SAP Business ByDesign.

SAP continues to grow the online channel through SAP Store, where customers can discover and explore solutions and services from SAP and partners. In many cases, they can also test or download free trials, or purchase solutions. Now available on the Apple iTunes Store, SAP Store is the destination of choice for SAP customers for all their on-demand business software needs, from integration services and add-ons to report templates, mashups and mobile apps. Currently, there are over 100 complementary solutions for the SAP Business ByDesign™ solution and mobile apps for SAP Business Suite applications available on the store, with more added every week.

The SAP Sales OnDemand solution, with its people-centric design, allows salespeople to collaboratively include all those who need to participate in the flow of a sales opportunity. Wave 2 of the offering is now in general availability and will follow a six-month release cycle, with the next planned wave to focus on integration with the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application, sales forecasting and partner application integration.

In addition, the SAP Career OnDemand solution is planned for availability to pilot customers in 2012. This people-centric, collaborative solution aims to support employee goal management and career development. The SAP Travel OnDemand solution is planned for availability for first customer trials in the coming months, with general availability targeted for 2012. The solutions will join the expanding cloud application portfolio, which also includes the SAP Sourcing OnDemand and SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand solutions.

Recent partnerships that have expanded on-demand solution options from SAP and extended its ecosystem include Amazon Web Services, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition and Verizon.

SAP continues to deliver key products and technologies via virtual and cloud infrastructures. The company today announced a deepening of its partnerships with EMC and VMware, for more information, see: “SAP Drives Openness and Choice for Virtualization and Cloud Computing.”

To learn more about Gartner’s assessment of SAP’s technology strategy, see: “SAP Throws Down the Next-Generation Architecture Gauntlet With [SAP] HANA.”

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd Madrid, visit the Events newsroom.

SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd Madrid

In 2011, SAP brings together its largest ecosystem education event series with its premier customer conference for a co-located event being held in Madrid, Spain, from November 8-10. With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe, and can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. SAP TechEd brings IT managers, software developers, administrators, and business process experts together for a look under the hood of today’s business motors: the latest advances in in-memory and mobile technologies, and in on-premise, on-demand, and on-device applications from SAP and more. Follow on Twitter at @SAPTechEd and @SAPPHIRENOW, and join the conversation at #SAPTechEd and #SAPPHIRENOW.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 176,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of Sybase) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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Copyright 2011 SAP AG. All rights reserved.

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SOURCE SAP AG