Sidebar: CEO Sees SAP Software on More Intel Clusters

Computerworld - NEW YORK -- Henning Kagermann, CEO of SAP, spoke with Computerworld last week about the impact of Intel-based server clusters on his enterprise applications business. Excerpts from that interview follow:

Are you recommending to your customers that they move to Dell two- and four-way clusters? No, we can't. We have [SAP] benchmarks, and these benchmarks are standard benchmarks for all of the key hardware suppliers. If Dell can achieve very, very good figures, as we have seen in the standard environment, then it's something that is known to all customers in the world, and it's up to them to make their choice. But SAP never makes recommendations. A customer makes a choice. That's very important, because the client wants us to be, to some extent, neutral.

Based on what you're seeing in the benchmarks, do you expect to see a lot of your symmetric multiprocessing users moving to two- and four-way Intel clusters? There is a momentum, yes. How much? We will see. But if you look to the installations in the last quarters, we can see some [growth], that's true.

A lot of your customers run their systems on Unix-based Sun and IBM systems. Are you concerned that you might alienate some of those customers with the Dell agreement? No. You have to understand, all these clients, when they invested in hardware, also looked at the benchmarks at that time.
Making benchmarks is not new for SAP. We started in the 1990s, because when Unix took off, there was always the question of which Unix flavor is the best one. Now I think we have new players, and [Dell CEO] Michael Dell is changing the game. Now, for new clients there is a new benchmark, and they will make up their mind. But that's up to the customer.

Henning Kagermann, CEO of SAP