SAP, HP Bundle Up Managed Service

SAP and HP are bundling their
best-known products into a new managed service, the companies said
today.

The platform is a combination of SAP’s MySAP ERP
platform running on top of HP’s Adaptive Enterprise. The pact
is targeted at mid-sized companies that pull in between $100 million and
$1 billion in annual revenue.

Starting at $325 per user per month, SAP and HP said they will
install a VPN client for the managed service, which includes
software and implementation services from SAP, as
well as maintenance and end-user training, support, functional
management and application management.

As the data center provider, HP said it will take care of operations,
infrastructure hosting, storage-on-demand, business recovery solutions,
managed Web solutions and security. HP said its infrastructure for the
SAP partnership runs on Microsoft SQL Server and NT, because the company wanted
to offer an easy comfort zone first. HP is also
considering expanding its per-user model relationship with SAP to run on
HP’s morphing
Utility Data Center (UDC).

“Typically most of these customers are working on limited IT
resources, and they may be making an investment in other areas than
infrastructure,” Gary Fromer, a senior vice president with SAP America
told internetnews.com.

“They also have a specific comfort zone.
They want to dial into the system and run their businesses. This
solution is not just for back-end or client devices. Some of these
customers are using devices that read information and transmit that to
the database, such as a food scale or RF [scanner] gun.”

SAP and HP already have a working relationship, such as their
alliance in 2002 on business portals.

David Booth, a senior vice president in the Enterprise Customer
Segment for HP, was especially quick to defend HP’s pricing
model against Sun’s current utility pricing model.

“Our solution was jointly developed and is not another me-too, low-end
generic modeling infrastructure offered at a discount. Nor is this a
niche offering,” Booth said.

Likewise, Fromer said the current battle between Oracle and
PeopleSoft was incidental because SAP already has the lead in the ERP
marketplace, adding that his competition’s turmoil only puts
SAP in a stronger position.

Posturing aside, analysts like Mike Gilpin, a vice president and
research director at Forrester Research, suggest that the greatest
potential value lies in management automation,
especially in lowering cost of ownership, in the indirect costs of
configuration and administration. However, he said his sense of the
demand for this kind of offering, more utility pricing oriented, is
that it is not strong.

“I don’t think that when most potential customers of this kind of
offering add up the various pricing options that they see the per-user
pricing as being as attractive as they might have hoped,” Gilpin told
internetnews.com. “I do occasionally see companies that are in
unusual businesses with very elastic demand for workload looking at how
new pricing models could help them. But that’s the exception rather than
the rule.”

Fellow Forrester analyst Randy Heffner also said the announcement is
significant given SAP’s track record.

“SAP has a good program of partnering with hardware vendors and
certifying high-end server features for interaction with SAP’s software,” Heffner said.
“I don’t have the specifics on certifications related to adaptive
computing, but I would expect that if they are not there already, that
SAP and HP are working on them.”

SAP and HP estimate they already have 300,000 customers running on
the joint service in early contracts with customers such as Implico GmbH
for oil and gas fuel distribution, GEMS, Inc. for technical service
providers and Bristlecone for high tech devices.

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