As part of its commitment to the SAP NetWeaver Partner Initiative, Sun Microsystems announced today the opening of the Sun Excellence Center for SAP NetWeaver in Walldorf, Germany. Established to help customers derive more business value from SAP applications on Sun systems, Sun is one of the first to establish a customer center demonstating how customers using SAP software solutions can reduce costs, increase ease of use, and leverage existing IT investments. With customized attention, customers are shown the innovative ways Sun and SAP combine heterogeneous applications, databases, and platforms into a single system using the SAP NetWeaver integration and application platform running on Sun’s infrastructure solutions.

“Customers want new, low cost, high performance solutions that allow them to scale their systems up and out as business conditions warrant,” said Stuart Wells, senior vice president, market development organization (MDO), Sun Microsystems. “The creation of the Sun Excellence Center for SAP NetWeaver offers customers a chance to leverage the technology expertise of two global IT leaders and unify disparate applications and systems into one powerful, highly scalable network services architecture.”

“SAP NetWeaver leverages a customer’s existing IT investment, and lays the groundwork for tomorrow’s cross-enterprise processes,” said Mark Sochan, vice president, SAP NetWeaver Partner Program. “The establishment by Sun of an Excellence Center for SAP NetWeaver demonstrates our continued commitment to present customers a risk-free opportunity to re-allocate existing IT resources, reduce cost, minimize the time to introduction and evolve new business processes.”

The Excellence Center for SAP NetWeaver features a unique, risk-free facility designed to demonstrate pre-tested SAP NetWeaver implementations on existing or modified hardware and software infrastructures built using Sun StorEdge systems and Sun Fire volume and enterprise systems running the Solaris Operating System and Sun Java Enterprise System. Each sample implementation is intended to help customers identify immediate opportunities to generate new value, reduce cost and complexity, and optimize performance across their business systems. As part of the joint Sun and SAP commitment to become trusted IT advisors, the Center helps customers explore the synergies between current and future IT strategies—offering assessment services to estimate financial benefits and performance improvements using SAP NetWeaver on Sun systems.

The Sun Excellence Center for SAP NetWeaver is located in the iForce(SM) Competency Center for SAP solutions in Walldorf, Germany, which was recently expanded to include the Sun and SAP joint Java Technology Center. Co-location of the Java Technology Center and iForce Competency Center allows customers convenient access to the latest integration of technology from Sun and SAP, continuously refreshed as a result of Sun’s annual R&D budget investment of $2 billion.