At its third-annual Virtualization Week event, being held in Palo Alto from April 20-22, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) is bringing together customers and partners to address how virtualization is currently used in SAP landscapes as well as future trends and issues. One key theme of this year's Virtualization Week is that virtualization technologies themselves are increasingly becoming one piece of a much larger puzzle related to sustainability and Green IT. To support an ongoing dialogue around these topics, SAP, together with key members of its ecosystem, announced a new community focused on facilitating "Green IT" collaboration and solution creation. This effort is part of SAP's long-term strategic focus on sustainability (see "SAP Increases Focus on Sustainable Business"), which comprises SAP's own operations as well as developing sustainable business process and green IT solutions that help SAP customers operate in a more sustainable way.

"Vendor strategists must raise their sights to take in and capture the full value of IT across the landscape of green business opportunity," explains Chris Mines , senior vice president at Forrester Research, in the March 2009 report Mapping IT's Green Opportunities. "The foreground of energy efficiency and waste reduction--the green IT 1.0 zone where many strategists focus today--will soon be eclipsed by a broader horizon. IT will drive new sustainability value in business processes and public infrastructure projects in the world of green IT 2.0, that will spur IT innovation and growth for years to come."

SAP will use the new, SAP-led Green IT community to drive sustainability research and development initiatives with partners and customers. SAP will continue to promote innovative optimization technologies like virtualization together with its partners and offer relevant services, such as system landscape optimization, which help customers maximize the use of their computing resources. 

SAP, Partners and Customers Take Advantage of Accessibility of the SAP Ecosystem
Founding members of the Green IT community include partners and key customers with a track record in ecosystem community co-innovation with SAP that are able to identify unique opportunities and invest in influencing the new solutions and services for Green IT globally and identify opportunities within the community for co-innovation. These partners and customers include: Brown-Forman Corporation, Citrix, Colgate, EMC, F5, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Network Appliance Inc., Novell, Sun Microsystems, T-Systems and VMware. Continuing SAP's leadership in collaboration and co-innovation, this member-based community will collaborate in a dedicated online environment hosted by SAP to exchange ideas, discuss industry trends and customer needs, and provide guidance on future product development and co-innovation opportunities. More companies will be invited to join as collaboration efforts intensify.

Customers Within Community to Impart New Solution Needs as Requirements Increase
SAP customer and partner T-Systems, a division of Deutsche Telekom that provides desktop services, systems integration, computing and network services, was SAP's pilot customer for its first virtualization effort in 2002. T-Systems joins SAP's Green IT community to provide vital information to the group on the growing requirements customers now face as globalization initiatives are more heavily mandated by governments.

"As a leader in the virtualized and automated delivery of SAP solutions with its Dynamic Services platform, T-Systems supports over 300,000 SAP users with this unique, integrated, multi-tenancy platform from multiple data centers across the globe," explains Gregory Smith , vice president Technical Deal Solution Design, T-Systems North America. "To offer services in a cost- and energy-saving way, T-Systems has developed the Green Dynamics model for the efficient use of IT infrastructures in environmentally friendly data centers. T-Systems is delighted to join SAP and other companies in the Green IT community to collaborate on such solutions."

"In this cost-sensitive economic environment, many IT organizations see virtualization as the natural first step of their Green IT journey," says Peter Graf , chief sustainability officer and executive vice president of Sustainability Solutions, SAP AG. "We witness a growing number of our customers adopt virtualization for greater parts of their IT landscape--enjoying fast return on investment, lower energy consumption and a reduced carbon footprint. The new Green IT community will engage the thriving SAP ecosystem and foster co-innovation among SAP customers, partners and SAP itself. Launching the Green IT community during Virtualization Week reflects our strategic commitment to sustainability--both internally, as we have virtualized large parts of our own data centers, and externally, as SAP and partners enable our customers' IT departments to operate in a more sustainable way."

SAP Virtualization Week is being held April 20-22, 2009, at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto, California. In 25 sessions, speakers from SAP and its customers and partners will talk about their experiences with SAP in virtual environments.