SAP’s goal is to be able to provide its customers the maximum of flexibility to create the best IT environment for their needs and be able to get the most value out of their business applications driving growth and profit. Openness, flexibility, and integrity of our products have always been part of our product strategy, putting customers in the position to decide what’s best for their IT environment. So the main reason is to offer you a free choice. Many SAP customers want to use Intel hardware and at the same time use their Unix know-how. Linux is growing with incredible speed and absolutely meets the quality standards of SAP. And thanks to the platform-independent SAP architecture, the port of the SAP kernel was fairly easy: none of the SAP business applications had to be modified.
Another reason is the number of Unix operating systems SAP has to support. Especially when you try to get the maximum performance out of your hardware resources, there are significant differences between the different Unix flavors. SAP has to maintain, test and support each possible combination of OS, database, hardware, and mySAP release. With Intel moving to 64 bit there is a high probability of even more Unix flavors.
A consolidation of these Unix derivatives would benefit both vendors and customers. From our point of view, Linux has a realistic chance to become the unified Unix running on different hardware platforms. If Open Source continues like this, it is very important for a software company to adapt early to the new situation. We are very proud that SAP was the first software in the world that run mission-critical ERP operations on Linux. We expect Linux to be successful in low and high-end installations and SAP, as Trusted Adviser, is helping customers to make the right decisions around SAP on Linux.
