PALO ALTO, Calif., June 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP)
today announced multiple ground-breaking projects coming out of the SAP
Co-Innovation Lab, located at the SAP campus in Palo Alto, California. Among
the projects that are being created and developed in the lab are a private
online collaboration workspace, support for enterprise service-oriented
architecture (SOA) management, a disaster recovery solution, a real-time
reporting solution for manufacturers, and solutions that help companies
improve business performance. Established in June 2007 with support from
founding sponsors HP, Intel Corporation, NetApp and Cisco, the SAP
Co-Innovation Lab is a hands-on working environment for SAP, its customers and
partners to build and execute joint projects, enabling them to co-innovate new
business applications and technology solutions to address specific customer
needs.


SAP Fosters Co-Innovation Through Private Enterprise Collaboration

Today's social collaboration tools provide readily available and easily
accessible platforms for shared communications, but do not provide the
governance and layered access required for business communications. In an
effort to address this need, one of the leading projects developed in the SAP
Co-Innovation Lab is the collaboration workspace from SAP. The workspace
provides Web 2.0 infrastructure -- such as blogs, wikis and online
forums -- with built-in governance for all companies to participate and
collaborate in real time within a secure business network community. The
collaboration workspace from SAP provides customers, system integrators,
technology partners and independent software partners within the SAP ecosystem
a secure online environment to collaborate and foster virtual interaction,
while protecting intellectual property assets and tightly managing access
levels and authorized information sharing.


The collaboration workspace is enabling 13 different programs at SAP to be
more effective and efficient, bringing together more than 3,700 expert users
from more than 275 companies, participating in more than 200 unique
workspaces. Users include partners and customers participating in SAP's
communities of innovation, including the Enterprise Services Community, the
Business Process Expert community and the SAP Co-Innovation Lab itself.

"The collaboration workspace from SAP is a powerful, new tool -- and has
brought an important additional dimension to Procter & Gamble's engagement in
SAP's ecosystem," said Dietmar Giljohann, initiative manager, Order
Acquisition, Procter & Gamble. "We're happy to see SAP's leadership around
projects like this in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, producing tangible results
that benefit the whole ecosystem."


SAP Ecosystem Tackles Opportunities in Enterprise SOA Management

Enterprise service-oriented architecture provides opportunities for
customers to better align IT and business to achieve higher levels of business
agility. SAP customers benefit from the visibility and control they achieve by
managing the runtime aspects of their composite SOA applications. With an
effective management infrastructure, these customers can enforce policies,
manage service-level agreements and secure loosely coupled systems that span
departments and extend to partners. Members of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab are
working together to optimize these SOA runtime management capabilities for SAP
enterprise services. To achieve this goal, customers and partners are working
with SAP to define key real-world scenarios that are tested and evaluated in
the lab. The results will enable the publishing of best practices for
customers and partners around SOA-based policy management and enforcement,
including in high-volume scenarios. Among the first technology firms
supporting SOA management projects in the lab are AmberPoint and Sonoa
Systems, both backed by SAP Ventures, and SOA Software.


"The SAP ecosystem, and the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in particular, have been
a great asset as we shape our SOA adoption strategy," said Barney Sene, CTO,
Ingram Micro. "Since SAP works directly with other companies whose products
we've invested in, like SOA Software, we can get clearer, more aligned
direction from both parties on topics like SOA management and operational
governance. We also have access to implementation insights that have been
thought through for the long haul in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab."


SAP Teams With VMware and NetApp to Simplify Disaster Recovery

Since SAP solutions are considered mission-critical to the daily operation
of many businesses, these companies are constantly on the lookout for disaster
recovery plans to ensure that their SAP solutions are back online quickly and
reliably in the event of a system failure. However, many companies find that
the formalized disaster recovery plans available today are expensive,
time-intensive and difficult to implement. With a goal of addressing this
business need, SAP teamed with VMware and NetApp in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab
to work together on an automated and cost-effective disaster recovery offering
for SAP implementations.


The goal of this project was to help companies lower the cost of
maintaining a disaster recovery program, and to simplify the disaster recovery
process and increase its reliability. Using VMware Site Recovery Manager and
NetApp storage solutions, this project explored solutions for simplifying the
previously complex disaster recovery steps by providing automated disaster
recovery testing procedures and offering the option of automated daily
disaster recovery tests. The results demonstrated the ability to improve
recovery time from days to hours or minutes, and improve recovery point
objectives from 24 hours to one hour or less.


Cisco and SAP Collaborate to Address "Borderless Manufacturing"

Today's manufacturers frequently operate across several different
geographies, often in far-flung locations, and require instant and accurate
visibility across their supply chains. SAP has teamed with Cisco in the SAP
Co-Innovation Lab to explore solutions that help enable manufacturers to share
and deliver with industry-leading security key performance indicators (KPIs)
and production data across plants. Taking advantage of the SAP(R)
Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) application and the
Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) from Cisco, the project simulated
near-real-time reporting from a vendor or customer manufacturing facility.


The project included several different demonstration scenarios that
support the vision of "borderless manufacturing" for inventory and KPI metric
collaboration across a manufacturer's worldwide locations. The results of the
project provided manufacturers with the ability to interact with vendors'
inventory systems in a controlled environment, access to real-time messaging
and collaboration with vendors -- all supported by Web-based entry that is
accessible from anywhere within a manufacturer's network.


SAP, Business Objects and Deloitte Consulting LLP Help Businesses Improve
Corporate Performance

Many companies today lack a comprehensive solution to manage corporate
performance across the enterprise. They are often faced with information silos
that prevent them from making informed business and execution decisions that
can impact financial performance. To address this business need, SAP and
Business Objects, an SAP company, are collaborating with Deloitte Consulting
LLP (Deloitte Consulting) through the SAP Co-Innovation Lab to create industry
and market-specific service offerings that help companies in their efforts to
close the loop between strategy and execution. The collaboration will showcase
service offerings that combine SAP solutions for governance, risk and
compliance (GRC), enterprise performance management (EPM) and the Business
Objects business intelligence (BI) platform with Deloitte Consulting's thought
leadership in performance improvement applications and industry consulting
experience, knowledge and skills. The companies are working together to
demonstrate that customers can benefit from integrated GRC, EPM and BI
solutions to enable more effective decision-making and to improve business
performance across the enterprise.

The demonstrations hosted in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab will show how
companies can adaptively change corporate strategy and launch campaigns
dynamically in response to market and competitive risks. The advantage to
customers is to be able to embed risk management into operational processes
and to continually monitor and adjust a company's performance against
strategy.

"Software vendors are relying more on their partner networks to expand
into new markets and provide competitive advantage to their customers and
partners," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal, Enterprise Applications
Consulting. "SAP has clearly taken a leadership position in this regard by
leveraging its ecosystem to collaborate and develop new solutions with its
customers and partners. The interactions between customers and partners
enabled by the SAP Co-Innovation Lab are proof that SAP understands the value
of placing its customers at the center of innovation."


SAP Co-Innovation Lab Showcases the Power of the SAP Ecosystem

Along with the development of ground-breaking projects, the SAP
Co-Innovation Lab also supports other collaboration-rich activities. The lab
hosts a series of seminars and Webinars, thought leadership forums, and onsite
and online collaborations with SAP and other industry leaders. The lab offers
high-impact demonstrations and solution showcases with onsite and online
access, providing a rich customer experience. The lab also helps to lower the
cost of innovation by enabling close cooperation with partners and customers,
and by providing a simulated heterogeneous and full-featured data center. (For
comments from partners, see addendum quote sheet at
http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.aspx?pressID=9668.)


"These examples show how the SAP Co-Innovation Lab is providing a
completely new type of collaboration platform for the industry's top minds to
work together on the most pressing business challenges our customers face
today," said Zia Yusuf, executive vice president, Global Ecosystem and Partner
Group, SAP. "Our mutual customers stand to gain substantial benefits, as the
work done at the lab pulls together the SAP ecosystem to address the right
problem at the right time with a real, tangible solution. The combined efforts
of SAP and its customer-focused ecosystem are continuing to deliver on the
promises of co-innovation, collaboration, and thought leadership."

About SAP

SAP is the world's leading provider of business software(*), offering
applications and services that enable companies of all sizes and in more than
25 industries to become best-run businesses. With more than 47,800 customers
(excludes customers from the acquisition of Business Objects) in over 120
countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt
stock exchange and NYSE, under the symbol "SAP." (For more information, visit
http://www.sap.com)

(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource
planning and related applications.

_______________________________________________________________________________


For more information on SOA Appliances and SOA Gateways:

Check out the Official SOA Appliances Web Site:  www.soaappliances.com 

_________________________________________________________________________________________