Five-Year Plan Bears Fruit for SAP

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You’d think that only countries have five-year economic plans, but business software maker SAP is right up there with them.

And with its large workforce of more than 51,000 employees in 50 countries, why not?

In 2005, SAP (NYSE: SAP) launched an ambitious five-year plan to double its market through joint innovation with its partners.

It has just announced the first results of its five-year plan, coming out of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, located at its Palo Alto, Calif., campus.

One initiative is a disaster-recovery product developed with VMware (NYSE: VMW) and NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP).

Parag Patel, VMware’s vice president of alliances, told InternetNews.com that the companys’ combined product “gives you all the information and guidance on how to perform disaster recovery on SAP applications.”

This is an automated disaster-recovery system so, “if something happens to your primary SAP site, you can automatically recover your SAP applications at a secondary site.”

The application, which SAP plans to release later this year, incorporates VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM), Patel said.
P>Another project is the joint creation of SAP, its Business Objects subsidiary and Deloitte Consulting.

It combines SAP’s solutions for governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and enterprise performance management (EPM) and the Business Objects business intelligence (BI) platform with guidelines from Deloitte.

GRC is becoming increasingly important in enterprises as they struggle to comply with various regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (define) and the credit card industry’s PCI-DSS (define) standard.

Enterprise performance management is “the question of how well the company overall is doing against its business objectives,” Richard Probst, SAPs vice president of solution co-innovation, told InternetNews.com.

Although SAP is integrating its products with those from Business Objects, which it purchased in October for $6.78 billion, “customers don’t yet have a good sense of how to bring those products together in an end-to-end solution,” Probst said.

Deloitte is helping SAP show its customers how to put those applications together.

Other projects unveiled are a private online collaboration workspace, support for enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) management and real-time reporting for manufacturers.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.