SAP Expands Direct Hosting

SAP AG (NYSE:SAP) Monday (Feb 12) announced that its Americas subsidiary, SAP America Inc., is extending its direct hosting offering by delivering key new services and naming Hewlett-Packard Co. and Electronic Data Systems Corp. (NYSE:EDS) as its Preferred Data Center Providers.

“We are pleased to further our commitment to our customers by delivering the best software solutions for businesses of all sizes through a world-class hosting offering,” said Wolfgang Kemna, CEO of SAP America Inc. “With several new customers for our direct hosting offering, we are achieving our goals of delivering our own hosted offerings, continuing to support our certified hosting partners’ offerings and providing customers with the flexibility to choose the services that enable their businesses to focus on what they do best.”

mySAP Hosted Solutions are provided to customers in two ways: through the certified partner program via one of SAP’s vertically aligned hosting partners, and through the hosting offering delivered directly by SAP, under which customers engage and contract directly with SAP for the entire offering. By providing this flexibility, SAP empowers customers of varying industries and sizes to leverage the best software solutions to meet their needs today and into the future.

“In the hosting and ASP market, providing customers with the flexibility to select from a variety of capable and knowledgeable hosting providers is critical to success,” said Stephen Graham, vice president of Software Partnering and Alliances with International Data Corp. “SAP’s extensive community of certified hosting partners and the move to include HP and EDS as Preferred Data Center Providers shows SAP has the commitment and expertise to further build the success of mySAP Hosted Solutions.”

With HP and EDS as Preferred Data Center Providers, the SAP hosting offering will provide a spectrum of new services, including implementation hosting, application hosting and marketplace hosting. The two companies have extensive experience hosting SAP applications, with a combined total of more than 300,000 seats in their hosted SAP user bases. Now, as Preferred Data Center Providers, they will provide a full range of data center operations services, including infrastructure hosting, storage-on-demand, business recovery solutions, managed Web solutions and security services.

EDS will build on that experience to deliver data center services to SAP for application hosting and implementation hosting of mySAP.com solutions, as well as hosted end-user learning and training with the mySAP Knowledge Database.

“EDS created the outsourcing industry nearly 40 years ago, managing clients’ critical applications and data,” said John Wilkerson, president of EDS Global Indirect Markets. “This experience has resulted in world-class hosting capabilities offered from some of the most hardened data centers in the industry. We see a lot of potential in the market for SAP’s direct hosting offering.”

HP will provide data center services to SAP to support the hosting of focused enterprise-wide mySAP solutions such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management, as well as marketplace hosting on NT platforms.

“HP and SAP expect to provide the market with fast, secure and low-risk hosted SAP solutions,” said Juergen Rottler, vice president and general manager of HP Services, North America. “To accomplish this, HP offers more than a basic data center provider. HP provides extensive experience in the development and management of IT architecture within a data center environment and is a company that understands the needs of customers looking to outsource their IT operations.”

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