Virtualization.com
News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
Virtustream, a provider of cloud services and infrastructure solutions, today announced a partnership with VMware to demonstrate the viability and efficiency of running SAP applications in a secure, multi-tenanted enterprise cloud environment.
Through a new program offered by Virtustream, qualified SAP customers can test drive running their SAP applications on Virtustream’s enterprise cloud platform, xStream, with resources optimized by VMware vSphere.
Expanding their long-term partnership with a joint base of thousands of customers, SAP and Microsoft today announced their plans to improve integration between SAP software and Microsoft virtualization and cloud computing technologies.
These plans include innovations to people-centric applications development for SAP software as well as virtualization and cloud computing without disruption of customer IT landscapes.
The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 15-18, 2011.
The parties plan to make business processes from SAP software more easily consumed and extended by .NET developers, simplifying the overall application development process. This level of access will help redefine the SAP/Microsoft developer landscape with shorter development cycles, lower costs and openness into core applications.
Microsoft and SAP are also planning to provide integration between upcoming landscape management software from SAP, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V technology, bringing greater agility for cloud management and deployments.
According to Reuters, EMC and SAP are about to team up to deliver computer programs over the web. The news company cites a senior executive from German software provider SAP AG, President of SAP Labs North America and member of the SAP Executive Board Doug Merritt, predicting an upcoming partnership whereby the companies will use virtualization technology centralizing computing and storage functions at data centres (‘cloud computing’).
Merritt chose not to discuss specifics, such as the expected launch date for the new venture and the financial details involved. Moreover, EMC, while openly betting hosting software and services will be a key to growth over the coming years, declined to comment on Merritt’s statements. A blog post by Chuck Norris Hollis, an EMC VP, doesn’t shed more light on the potential alliance but hints at the possibility of a partnership.
If EMC eventually enters the web hosting game through its partnership with SAP, it will be entering a market filled with household name competitors like HP, Symantec, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and IBM.
So far EMC has only announced one key services product, namely MozyEnterprise, an upgraded version of automated backup service Mozy that it acquired last year. EMC reportedly said earlier this month it plans to sell Mozy’s services to large corporations, through a recently upgraded EMC infrastructure dubbed ‘Fortress’.
SAP has also been noisy about launching its own flavor of SaaS program BusinessByDesign to combat Salesforce.com. At an announcement in September, SAP said it would look to partner with companies to provide applications and hosting, which it now seems to have found in EMC.
Technorati Tags: BusinessByDesign, , Chuck+Hollis, , cloud+computing, , data+centre, , Doug+Merritt, , EMC, , Fortress, , hosting, , Mozy, , MozyEnterprise, , Reuters, , SAP, , SAP+AG, , virtualisation, , virtualization