This morning  SAP CTO Visha Sikka,  VMWare CEO Paul Maritz, and Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior announced to the SAPPHIRENOW crowd in Orlando and Frankfurt an unprecedented partnership between the Virtual Computing Coalition (VCE) and SAP designed to accelerate the customers virtualization and/or the  potential adoption of cloud computing model 
This major announcement reinforced the message delivered yesterday by the SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe at SAPPHIRENOW –“ SAP is definitely committed to a software and hardware stack approach” , and “decided to work with leaders such as Cisco, EMC and VMware …companies that are at the best at what they do”

This announcement was also immediately detailed by a panel of senior executives who discussed based on a real customer case studie, how VCE Vblock infrastructure Packages helps the SAP virtualization delivering huge benefits in terms of performances, speed of deployment and TCO. Member of the panel were 
-Tom Peck  CIO at Levi Strauss & Co.
-Pat Gelsinger President and COO  EMC information  infrastructure Products
-Andre Hughes Global Managing Director of Accenture Cisco Business Group  
-Kevin Ichhpurani, SVP Global Software and Technologies SAP

At SAPPHIRENOW in Orlando, I met Manjula Talreja, Cisco VP Virtual Computing Environment coalition to better understand what this partnership between VCE and SAP  means for our customers

The addition of SAP in the partner ecosystem is an additional proof of the huge interest of the customers for the unified computing approach and more specifically the Vblock concept -
I met also at  SAPPHIRENOW the team in charge of the SAP NetWeaver Adaptive Computing Controller , one of the major force inside SAP , in charge of helping the customer to move to virtualization- There is no doubt in my mind that this partnership represents a great opportunity  for SAP customers to facilitate the virtualization journey envisioned by SAP technological leaders, and already embraced by early adopters Cisco SAP customers, such as Pacific Coast Building Products

If you are in Orlando , don’t hesitate to stop at the Cisco booth (1211) to meet our experts, or to attend one the speaking sessions on UCS, Vblock organized with partners such as Accenture, Cap Gemini, Tata Consultancy Services, or Wipro .

If you want to know more about Cisco and SAP partnership visit http://www.cisco.com/go/sap

To learn more about the announcement, read also  the SAP press announcement  and EMC Chuck Hollis blog