Ground-Breaking projects emerging from SAP Co-Innovation Lab Address Today's Pressing Business Challenges

SAP AG 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.

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 authorised information sharing.

The collaboration workspace is enabling 13 different programmes 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."

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 optimise 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."

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 formalised 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 programme, 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.

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.

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 centre of innovation."

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 centre.

"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."