HDS Expands Relationship With SAP

Hitachi, Ltd. become an SAP global technology partner, expanding its global partnership with SAP AG to include deeper technology integrations, technical support, a new interoperability competency center, and joint sales and marketing activities worldwide.

The strengthened partnership spotlights further integration between offerings from SAP and Hitachi in the areas of cloud computing, storage virtualization, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and information lifecycle management (ILM).

Through dedicated resources and investments, the new partnership framework with Hitachi companies and SAP will provide customers with the information to achieve value from solutions from SAP and Hitachi, including lower implementation and operational costs based on the optimization of infrastructure and software solutions. The global collaboration is designed to bring customers faster conflict resolution across Hitachi companies, and to advance strategic business development agreements to meet the needs of joint customers.

"Hitachi and SAP have a long history of collaboration and we are pleased to take our partnership to a new level as an SAP global technology partner," said Toshiaki Kawamura, division vice president, Enterprise Server Division, Hitachi, Ltd. "At Hitachi we have developed our business globally; not only our information and telecommunication infrastructure business but also in areas such as electronics, electricity, transit and urban infrastructure. We have leading implementation expertise in support of SAP applications and now look forward to creating a framework for deeper integration and collaboration across Hitachi companies worldwide."

"This expanded global technology partnership with Hitachi demonstrates the value of SAP’s customer-focused ecosystem: teaming with partners to deliver value and innovation to customers," said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, Business Development and Strategic Alliances, SAP. "Together, we will cooperate to enhance value and accelerate growth and profit for our customers. This will help reduce implementation costs while providing strong solutions to transform business processes."

Hitachi and its subsidiaries, including Hitachi Data Systems Corp., have had a strategic relationship with SAP since 1994, including the sale, integration and implementation of SAP solutions. Together, Hitachi and SAP certify integrated offerings that provide mutual customers with industry-leading availability, scalability and performance for their critical corporate information.  

About HDS Solutions Integrated With SAP Applications
HDS solutions provide improved performance, application storage management and efficiency for customers who need to lower their enterprise application TCO. Solutions integrated with SAP applications, including SAP-certified components, add value to investments throughout their lifecycle by making IT virtualized, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable. HDS enables customers to deploy a fully virtualized storage infrastructure to act as a logical fourth tier of their SAP implementations, enhancing the health and performance of vital data, application and presentation layers.

Integrated solutions include the following:

• Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) and Hitachi Command Suite (HCS) – for high performance, availability and security for enterprise information through a 3D storage platform. The increased availability and business resilience, improved application deployment and data migration of Hitachi VSP and HCS improves customers’ implementations of SAP solutions.
• Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) in support of the SAP NetWeaver Information Lifecycle Management component – to support multiple storage tiers of active and archived unstructured content, all on a single integrated platform. This enables end-to-end enforcement of retention policies to better meet compliance requirements and reduce management effort. Through a starter package – part of an SAP best practice offering for implementing SAP NetWeaver Information Lifecycle Management with a fixed scope – customers can use the SAP solution in a designated environment at SAP’s data center with HCP, helping to deploy solutions more quickly while lowering TCO.

"Applications from SAP complement Hitachi Data Systems solutions and services to help customers successfully and efficiently transform their IT environments into more dynamic and virtualized information centers," said Mike Walkey, senior vice president, Global Partners and Alliances, Hitachi Data Systems. "With our expanded partnership as an SAP global technology partner, customers will better leverage HDS proven technologies and services to reduce costs, mitigate risk and enable growth in advanced SAP solution-based environments."