SAP AG has announced the formation of the enterprise virtualisation community. Uniting technology vendors including AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, Intel Corporation, NetApp, Novell, Red Hat, Sun and VMware, the community aims to develop new strategies for business process-driven virtualisation to help companies cut costs while increasing efficiencies.

This advisory group for virtualisation was initiated by SAP within the Enterprise Services Community, a cross-industry programme enabling partners and customers to help shape the way software is developed and deployed to solve evolving business requirements.

"When I'm speaking with customers, virtualisation is discussed in almost every meeting," said Vishal Sikka, chief technology officer, SAP. "Companies are looking at how to best take advantage of virtualisation technology today and in the future, while customers are constantly evaluating their existing infrastructure and application investments. They know that leveraging virtual environments is critical for cost savings and to drive efficiencies. Today, SAP is breaking ground by leveraging the power and innovation of the ecosystem and bringing together these important virtualization vendors to assist companies in optimising business processes in virtualised environments."

"VMware and SAP have a strong partnership to deliver superior SAP implementations for customers," said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. "VMware is the only virtualisation platform certified and supported by SAP for both Windows- and Linux-based applications in production environments. We look forward to accelerating the uptake of a new generation of enterprise SOA business applications from SAP with the benefits of VMware virtualisation. Joint customers can experience dramatically lower total cost of ownership of their datacenter infrastructure, higher application uptime and reliability, improved productivity, strengthened security and a greener carbon footprint."