News

posted on 14 February 2008 09:09

Reuters reports that a high-level SAP staffer said EMC and SAP are talking about an EMC cloud service presenting SAP functions as a software service.

A SAP staffer confirmed to Reuters that early-stage talks were taking place.

They are probably taking about SAP's existing Business By Design service targeted at the SMB market and running on NetApp storage. It wouldn't refer to SAP's mainstream offering of SAP product customised in myriad detailed ways by each customer in time-consuming and complex projects.

EMC has said quite a lot about its coming web 2.0/cloud computing storage service built around Hulk hardware and Maui software. This will be much more than a clustered filesystem and should be an Amazon Web Services scale system. The idea is to deliver software as a service (SaaS) over the Internet, hosted on an extremely scalable storage and processing infrastructure. IBM bought XIV in January as part of its preparation fior entry into the market. Sun has characterised such systems as Red Shift computing referring to thweir immense scale.

Doug Merrit, SAP Labs North America president and SAP board member, said virtualization technology would be used, suggesting that VMware will feature in the proposed offering's infrastructure.

That's all, basically, that the Reuters report said. If true it confirms that EMC is thinking very seriously abouit its cloud computing offer and is not just focussing on storage.

It would, however, position EMC as a SAP proxy in SAP's market struggle with Oracle.

Reuters reports that an EMC spokesman would not comment on the proposed venture.

Read more about SAP's Business By Design here:- http://www.sap.com/solutions/sme/businessbydesign/index.epx