SAP and Cisco Expand Relationship, Collaborate to Develop New Breed of Network-Aware SOA Business Solutions

SAP and Cisco Expand Relationship, Collaborate to Develop New Breed of Network-Aware SOA Business Solutions

Further building on their relationship, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) and Cisco® Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced that they have entered into a global market innovation agreement to jointly develop a new breed of business solutions that can transform how applications and networks interact. These new solutions are designed to enable the business network agility that is essential to bringing together customers, partners, suppliers and employees across geographically dispersed, highly heterogeneous business and information technology landscapes. SAP and Cisco intend to develop business solutions that support their shared visions of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and integrate the context of operational business applications with the intelligence captured throughout the network, providing customers with high levels of visibility, control and responsiveness across the extended enterprise. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® ‘07, SAP’s international customer conference, being held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 22 – 25.

The new network-aware solutions from SAP and Cisco will focus on removing the artificial separation between application infrastructure and network infrastructure to intelligently route traffic based on contextual business relevance. The solutions provide the enterprise with right-time response to significant business events in context, anywhere, anytime, and from any device. The first solution produced from the collaboration will include composite applications that address the need for an integrated network and application platform providing a holistic view of the extended enterprise for better management of compliance and risk in today’s dynamic business environment. The companies also plan to integrate unified business communication, such as e-mail, voice and podcasting, into business process applications to increase responsiveness to selected process events.

“SAP and Cisco share a common perspective on the role of collaboration, communication and intelligent connectivity in empowering users and enabling the borderless enterprise,” said Doug Merritt, corporate officer and member of the Executive Council, head of Business User Development, SAP AG. “With SAP’s business process expertise and Cisco’s leadership in networking and IT infrastructure, we are uniquely positioned to help our customers maximize their global IT investments by delivering solutions that enable the right-time, intelligent and in-context business responses. This heightened degree of organizational insight and agility is essential to an organization’s ability to realize the business transformation opportunity that is before us.”

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