HP Boasts of 50,000 SAP Installations, Solaris 10 on X64 Gets SAP Support

Published: May 18, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

ERP software giant SAP is hosting its SAPPHIRE user group meeting in Orlando, Florida, this week, and Hewlett-Packard was on hand to brag about how big its SAP installed base was while Sun Microsystems was trumpeting the fact that SAP is going to support the running of its mySAP software and NetWeaver middleware on the Solaris 10 operating system on X64 servers.

HP wanted to make it clear everyone knew that it has done more SAP installations than any other IT player, with more than 50,000 installations, which according to HP represents about half of the installations SAP has done worldwide. Installations does not, by the way, mean customers. It literally means sites where SAP code is running. Right now, SAP has about 32,000 unique customers, and said a few weeks ago it had a goal of having over 100,000 customers by 2010. The company aims to do that by attacking the midrange market and by expanding the amount of software it sells to large enterprises. HP is itself a big SAP shop (just like IBM is), and it runs SAP applications on Windows and HP-UX.

SAP's software has been supported on the Sparc/Solaris stack for years, but Sun has had a relatively small share of SAP sales compared to its overall server sales because HP (including Compaq and Digital) and IBM had a much longer history of supporting midrange and enterprise ERP software than Sun. To be fair, Sun did a pretty good job riding the dot-com and Y2K booms and getting SAP sales, but once 2001 rolled around and HP and IBM became much more aggressive on pricing and performance with their Unix boxes, Sun lost a bit of momentum. But, with the advent of the "Galaxy" Opteron servers, Sun is giving even IBM's Power5 and Power5+ machines a run for the money in terms of bang for the buck, and the current dual-core UltraSparc-IV+ processors in Sparc-based Sun Fire servers are also very attractive compared to Unix alternatives.

SAP started supporting Windows with its then-new R/3 ERP suit, soon after Windows was announced. In 1997, when I did a big study of the SAP installed base, I calculated that SAP had a little more than 12,000 customers, with about 10,000 of them running R/3 and the remainder running the earlier R/2 release. Windows accounted for 47 percent of installations, and I was projecting that Compaq's ProLiant would, within two years, become the dominant platform for SAP. In 1997, Unix was by far the most popular R/3 platform, with about 7,000 installations, compared to about 3,000 for Windows. What HP didn't say in its statements was that its acquisition of Compaq is the main reason it is the leader in SAP installations.