HPQ: HP, SAP Form Research Collaboration

Bringing together resources from two of the world’s largest IT companies, HP today announced that it will collaborate with SAP AG on research aimed at improving the flexibility, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of IT systems for businesses of all sizes.

HP Labs and SAP Research, the central research facilities for the two companies respectively, will work together on technologies designed to exploit synergies between HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure management technologies and SAP’s Enterprise service-oriented architecture (Enterprise SOA). Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The Adaptive SAP project could help customers use hardware and software when and where they need it rather than gearing systems to run full force at all times. The companies aim to develop a model for choreographing IT systems so that hardware and software continually adapt to the varying daily workloads and changing business process needs of enterprises.

The project is designed to combine powerful technologies in model-based automation, virtualization and policy-based adaptation, with secure, compartmentalized deployment and execution environments. Such flexible, adaptable and cost-effective systems are expected to open up sophisticated business process solutions to small- and mid-size enterprises.

“This research agreement enhances our longstanding relationship with SAP by leveraging new elements of HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure architecture with SAP’s evolving product and service offerings for Enterprise SOA,” said Dick Lampman, HP senior vice president, research, and director, HP Labs. “The collaboration will help create a future generation of highly agile and adaptable solutions for customers.”

The project will be the first under a global agreement between the two companies covering collaborative research in areas that are changing the face of enterprise IT. As a result, HP Labs and SAP Research are also exploring topics such as SOA semantics, business process analytics and asset tracking based on RFID technologies. The aim is to help joint customers gain further flexibility in business processes and deploy their systems in innovative ways.

“SAP is very proud of working with HP and bringing two world-class research organizations together,” said Lutz Heuser, vice president, SAP Research, SAP AG. “Our complementary expertise in hardware and software will result in considerable benefits for our joint customers. This collaborative agreement is a milestone in industrial research collaboration and marks only the beginning of further endeavors.”

The global research will initially include HP Labs teams in the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as SAP Research in Germany, Northern Ireland and Australia.

With more than 50,000 installations for mutual customers, HP and SAP have been collaborating for 17 years on complementary hardware and software solutions. Nearly half of all SAP software installations worldwide are powered by HP technology.