SAP AG (NYSE:SAP) today announced the opening of a second SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Ohtemachi, Tokyo, Japan. Joining the first co-innovation lab, located in Palo Alto, California, the addition further broadens efforts by SAP to work with software solution partners, technology partners, service partners and customers to accelerate the innovation and delivery of solutions designed to address industry-specific business issues for companies around the world.

Taking advantage of Japan’s rich history of custom development, members of the Tokyo co-innovation lab will focus on identifying opportunities to address pressing business needs, including enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) adoption, green IT and virtualization techniques to assist with enterprise software implementation. The SAP Co-Innovation Lab Tokyo is endorsed by the following partners: ABeam Consulting Ltd., Dell Japan Inc., FUJITSU LIMITED, F5 Networks Japan K.K., HITACHI, Ltd., IBM Business Consulting Services K.K., IBM Japan, Ltd., Intel Corporation, Microsoft Co., Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Information Systems Corporation, NEC Corporation, NetApp K.K., REALTECH JAPAN Co., Ltd., Sun Microsystems K.K., Tecnos Japan Inc., Toyo Business Engineering Corporation and VMware K.K.

The SAP Co-Innovation Lab will focus on utilizing a global talent pool and fostering collaboration on projects based around a simulated heterogeneous data center integrating hardware and infrastructure software from the participating vendors. To best meet the needs of companies in today’s global environment, the lab’s work will re-create real-world situations on Web- enabled and Internet- or intranet-accessible business applications.

As part of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab Tokyo launch, two engagements have already delivered results, exemplifying the rapid benefits that co-innovation can deliver.

Intel Corporation and SAP have been cooperating closely worldwide, and, in Japan, their collaboration focuses on so-called “green IT” projects. Green IT is a key topic in Japan, a country that has initiated many environmental campaigns. In the facility that today becomes the SAP Co-Innovation Lab Tokyo, Intel and SAP have completed a green IT-related validation effort focused on identifying opportunities to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions with enterprise solutions.

Using servers powered by Quad Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors that replace older, single-core processors, total energy consumption related to the use of SAP(R) ERP was reduced by more than 50 percent. These energy consumption measurements used SAP ERP load cycles simulating 24 hours of server usage, including daily dialog processing and night batch job processing running under absolutely comparable conditions. These results are being made available to the public for the first time, which will help customers make more intelligent investment decisions.

Together with VMware Japan, SAP used the lab setting to identify the advantages of employing virtualization in SAP ERP upgrade projects using servers equipped with multi-core Intel processors. The one-month project proved that unifying existing servers into a virtual environment is possible through upgrade, and that system-proving activities can be done more easily utilizing VMware solutions. The result of this project was a white paper that partners and customers can use as a guide to achieving advantages throughout the upgrade process. As adoption of SAP ERP continues to build, SAP and partners are providing relevant tools and solutions that enable companies to take advantage of opportunities to improve business processes within the implementation process, enabling them to more rapidly deliver benefits to the business.

Opened in June 2007, SAP’s inaugural co-innovation lab in Palo Alto, California has demonstrated continuous success in innovation. With projects covering topics such as enterprise collaboration, SOA management, disaster recovery for SAP environments and business performance management, SAP and its lab partners have identified numerous solutions to address specific customer needs (see June 18, 2008 press release, titled “Ground-Breaking Projects Emerging from SAP Co-Innovation Lab Address Today’s Pressing Business Challenges”).