In order to deliver expanded support options to companies running their business operations on SAP applications and the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system, Novell and SAP announced an extension of their long-standing relationship. In a move that will help meet the growing demand for SUSE Linux Enterprise and provide support for the open source community, Novell and SAP are planning to offer enhanced options for customers who choose to run open source.

As part of this initiative, the companies will work together to enable SAP's enterprise applications to work with SUSE Linux Enterprise and Novell's virtualization and identity management technologies to provide new data center options for customers. In addition, the companies plan to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP's data center infrastructure requirements, further promote SAP Business All-in-One solutions based on SUSE Linux Enterprise and collaborate within the SAP Enterprise Services Community program to help strengthen customers related to the SAP governance, risk and compliance (GRC) practices. As a result, companies of all sizes will be enabled to run more of their mission-critical operations on SUSE Linux Enterprise, helping to further lower the total cost of ownership (TCO).

“From our entrance into the Linux market, our focus has been on delivering Linux for mission-critical deployments in the data center, and this relationship with SAP is a key step forward in that effort,” said Ron Hovsepian, Novell president and CEO. “We can now offer one of the best data center platforms and application stacks on the market, bar none. Extending this cooperation will make this a real game-changing relationship in the marketplace. We are excited to cooperate with SAP to deliver mission-critical applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise, along with top virtualization and security management capabilities.”

“As Linux continues to grow as a mainstream platform for supporting business applications, it becomes increasingly important for collaborative relationships between application software vendors such as SAP and infrastructure software vendors such as Novell,” said Al Gillen, research vice president, System Software at IDC. “This development, support and go-to-market effort should make it possible for SAP and Novell to deliver a better-integrated and more technically complete solution than users could achieve by assembling the same components on their own today. The end result is a lower barrier to adoption for SAP applications, particularly for midmarket companies, and an expanded addressable market for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.”

New Virtualization Offerings Provide Data Center Options for Customers
The broad agreement between Novell and SAP is designed to enable SAP's enterprise applications to work with SUSE Linux Enterprise and Novell's virtualization and security management technologies to provide powerful new data center options for customers. Working under the agreement, Novell plans, supported by SAP, to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP's data center infrastructure requirements, create an SAP Business All-in-One solution based on SUSE Linux Enterprise for small businesses and midsize companies, provide virtualization management for the Adaptive Computing Controller tool from SAP with Novell ZENworks Orchestrator, and integrate Novell's identity and security management solutions with the SAP GRC Access Control application.

Novell and SAP will integrate ZENworks Orchestrator, Novell's cross-platform virtualization management solution, with the Adaptive Computing Controller tool within the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. This integration will increase virtualization options for SAP customers and therefore can support the reduction of costs and allows for optimized deployment of SAP applications.

Optimized SUSE Linux Enterprise Provides Open Platform for SAP Applications
As part of their expanded relationship, Novell will work with SAP to create an optimized version of SUSE Linux Enterprise that will bring even more value to SAP customers. Through a variety of engagements – including SAP Hosting services, the SAP Developer Network (SDN) community, SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Business All-in-One solutions – Novell and SAP have made SAP applications available on SUSE Linux Enterprise. As a result, customers may see a reduced complexity of application deployments and are enabled to lower costs. SAP suggests SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to its customers with SAP Business All-in-One as a recommended Linux platform.

SAP is also using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (64-bit version) as one of the platforms for its SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator (SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator) software, an appliance jointly developed with HP, IBM and Intel that improves the performance of business intelligence queries, reduces administration tasks and shortens batch processes. This enhanced offering gives customers fast response times, regardless of the volume of data, number of users or complexity of analysis.

Offerings Optimized for SME Customers
While more than 700 of SAP's midmarket customers are already embracing SUSE Linux Enterprise, the recently announced collaboration with Intel will provide a new dimension of integration. The new offering for SAP Business All-in-One will be designed to combine business software, database, operating system and hardware into one optimized package, which will provide lower TCO for customers. The included hardware and software components will be pre-tested to help enable a faster time to value and to increase investment protection, and will be available through local OEMs in various geographies.

Furthermore, SAP has also chosen SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the platform for its hosted offering, SAP Business ByDesign, giving midmarket customers powerful, scalable, cost-effective access to SAP applications.

Enhanced Governance, Risk and Compliance Solutions SAP and Novell are collaborating within the SAP Enterprise Services Community program, hosted by SAP, to strengthen customers' governance, risk and compliance practices by supporting business access risk policies directly to user provisioning activities. Novell's cross-platform identity and security management offerings will leverage Web services available with SAP GRC Access Control, further enabling customers to extend compliant user provisioning across the complete enterprise, including the SAP application environment and systems from other vendors. By leveraging SAP GRC Access Control, companies are enabled to maintain compliance by matching employees' security authorizations with their roles and duties. The solution features user provisioning capabilities, which help manage compliant access across customers' varied IT landscapes.

“Organizations worldwide are increasingly turning to open source solutions with Linux as their core platform, so teaming with Novell and offering our customers SAP applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise meets a direct customer need,” said Léo Apotheker, deputy CEO and president of Customer Solutions and Operations, SAP. “Our cooperation goes beyond Linux to leverage industry-leading technologies from each company to give customers high-value, low-complexity solutions to pressing challenges such as regulatory requirements and optimizing applications in virtualized environments. This relationship marks another step forward in SAP's support of open source and standards-based computing.”

Furthermore, SAP is using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server internally as its Linux development platform, ensuring SAP applications are engineered from the ground up to run well on Linux.