VMware Customers Reporting Significant Cost Reduction

VMware, Inc., a global player in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, claims that customers are reporting significant cost reductions and operational efficiencies as a result of virtualizing SAP (News - Alert) solutions on the VMware platform in production environments.

Officials with VMware said that since completion of the companies' cooperative support agreement in December 2007, many customers have moved SAP solutions already running on the VMware platform in development environments into production.

Company officials claimed that customers report significantly lower capital and operating costs -- enough to pay for the solution in less than six months and potentially save millions of dollars over a few years, while improving infrastructure uptime and forming a foundation for private cloud environments.

One such customer is C. Rob. Hammerstein Group (CRH), a German automotive industry supplier that operates with more than 3,000 employees worldwide.

CRH says that it migrated its deployment of SAP solutions to the VMware platform, achieving three-year TCO savings exceeding $1.5 million -- an 81 percent reduction in costs compared to the previous environment -- and reducing planned downtime by 50 percent.

'The TCO savings we realized with VMware virtualization have enabled us to invest more in activities that drive our business rather than in IT maintenance,' said Michael Schatten, vice president, group information systems, C. Rob. Hammerstein Group, in a statement.

Schatten said that in addition, as a global automotive supplier with 24x7 business operations, reducing downtime was absolutely critical.

"Compared to our previous environment we see performance improvements of 30 to 40 percent for various online transactions and critical batch loads like materials requirement planning -- which makes the business more efficient and keeps our users of SAP solutions happy and productive,' he said.

T-Systems, the corporate customer unit of Deutsche Telekom (News - Alert), has also benefited from the virtualization of SAP solutions in production landscapes.

Company officials said that with the integration of VMware vSphere with the SAP NetWeaver Adaptive Computing Controller 7.2, which has been in a successful ramp-up phase during the past four months, even more value is provided to SAP customers using VMware solutions.

The integration, company officials said, enables an end-to-end view of the SAP solution landscape, bridging the gap between applications and the underlying virtual infrastructure. It provides administrators with one single interface to manage the entire SAP system landscape, hiding the underlying IT infrastructure.

The integration also enables online migration of virtualized systems for load balancing and hardware maintenance, rapid scale-out for starting new SAP application servers when additional capacity is required, and the opportunity to relocate instances of SAP solutions from a physical server to a virtualized server and vice versa.

'VMware and SAP AG work closely together to provide customers a fully supported solution that leverages virtualization for business-critical applications as they move to private cloud environments,' said Parag Patel, vice president, global strategic alliances organization, VMware, in a statement.

Patel said that these environments often include the SAP ERP application.

"Customers have demonstrated the enormous value achieved from the cooperation of VMware and SAP, and now we are seeing them accelerate their use of the VMware platform in mission-critical, production environments that include SAP solutions,' he said.