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3 years ago Cisco entered the server platform market with the Unified
Computing System (UCS). This server platform was built from the ground up
for virtualization and immediately started making an impact and gaining
market share. Today it holds the number 2 position worldwide for blades.

At this same time Cisco began to deepen its partnership with SAP. SAP
customers who had relied on Cisco for their networking gear looked to
expand the Cisco relationship by moving their SAP instances to UCS. SAP
HANA accelerated many of these customers move to UCS. Because SAP HANA
operated outside the bounds of the Data Center, it has allowed the
companies to look at UCS without affecting their current SAP instance
while proving UCS as a fast, reliable, scalable, cost reducing platform,
giving the customers confidence that Cisco UCS can more than handle the
mission-critical application workload

But that was just the beginning of the relationship between these two
giants. The diversity of both Cisco and SAP has allowed for a much more
strategic and far reaching relationship allowing each of us to expand our
business together.

SAP Afaria and Precision Retail in SAP’s mobility area combined with the
Cisco mobility and Cisco UCS platform business is bringing mobility to
the masses in a cost efficient way. In addition SAP has begun
collaboration with Cisco’s Jabber collaboration product again using UCS
as the basis platform for these products. Teamed together, Cisco’s and
SAP’s Cloud business has also made a big impact in the form of Vblock and
Flexpod.

Last but not least, Cisco, unlike its platform competitors, partners with
EMC and NetApp for the storage and SANS product in order to complete all
solutions with SAP. Customers enjoy the flexibility of these solutions
allowing them to keep the vendors they have already standardized on. An
added bonus to these customers is that it allows them to also maintain
their reseller relationships using the massive channel capabilities of
Cisco, where over 95 per cent of Cisco products are sold

Cisco and SAP recently completed a 20 city world wide SAP HANA and Cloud
road show generating millions of dollars of new revenue for both
companies. Cisco and SAP are the world leaders in their respective
areas, reinforcing their position in the market connecting the world in
the Internet of Things.



Authors

Rick Speyer

No Longer with Cisco