INDUSTRY

SAP AG and IBM today announced their intention to test and make available a low-cost, high-performance analytics packaged solution designed to make it easier for clients to gather, store and analyze critical business information. The solution will integrate the new high-performance analytics capability of SAP NetWeaver with IBM BladeCenter and TotalStorage systems to deliver unprecedented performance and flexibility breakthroughs in the business intelligence (BI) market. The high-performance analytics packaged solution is entirely developed and tested on IBM BladeCenter and IBM TotalStorage DS4300 system configurations. The announcement was made at SAP TechEd '05, being held in Vienna, Austria, September 21-23, 2005. Increasing volumes of business information are requiring SAP customers to perform highly interactive queries against large volumes of data. To overcome the traditional tradeoffs between query performance and query flexibility in business intelligence, companies need new adaptive computing platforms that possess greater flexibility, scalability, performance capabilities and availability. The new high-performance analytics packaged solution offers these capabilities; as a result, companies that adopt the new solution will be able to accelerate innovation cycles as workers gain access to critical information in seconds for what would have taken hours of manual work to collect. In addition, the solution gives more users the ability to execute queries, making access to a high level of business insight widespread throughout the organization. Initially, the joint high-performance analytics packaged solution stands to benefit customers worldwide running installations of SAP Business Information Warehouse and SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence. "The combination of SAP's high-performance analytics capabilities with IBM BladeCenter and TotalStorage hardware allows customers to deliver informed decisions to all management levels simultaneously, on demand," said Volker Loehr, general manager of Global SAP Alliance for IBM. "With IBM and SAP, customers can be confident that information will be delivered directly and quickly, using an architecture that is flexible with a low total cost of ownership." "IBM and SAP are in a position to deliver a complete end-to-end BI solution that is extremely scalable and enables customers to process large data volumes substantially faster than with traditional approaches," said Nimish Mehta, senior vice president, Enterprise Information Management, SAP. "This eliminates the tradeoff between speed and flexibility, providing customers with more advanced analytics and faster decision making as well as increased business process flexibility -- all resulting in clear competitive advantage." The new combined IBM and SAP solution are expected to rely on simple deployment and administration to deliver a self-service infrastructure for crucial business analytics. It is also expected to simplify management and help lower operation costs through on-demand capabilities found in BladeCenter, including self-management and self-configuration. IBM TotalStorage solutions enable quick and reliable access to substantial data volumes, providing customers extremely fast access to real-time queries. IBM DB2 Universal Database optimized for SAP software also complements the SAP NetWeaver based-technology, by providing a highly scalable and robust database that decreases overall maintenance costs. DB2 reinforces the advantages of high-performance analytics with unique features like Database Partitioning Feature, creating an SAP-based total BI infrastructure that is scalable, high performing and easy to use. IBM has worked closely with SAP on the definition of pre-packaged configurations for server and storage capacity together with all required software components. The extensible IBM infrastructure technology will allow for easy scalability once data and/or user load increases.