Hewlett-Packard and SAP to expand partnership

HP plans to offer services to help customers upgrade infrastructure, servers, storage and NetWeaver, the infrastructure software for SAP's business applications. In particular, the company is offering services to go with the $10,000 Discovery System that SAP released earlier this year. Other services include assessment, governance and architecture services for R3.

"We'll look at everyone: R3, the servers, the storage, the management, and then (we'll) make a proposal as to what needs to be updated," said Tim Treat, manager of worldwide package applications for enterprise application services at HP Consulting & Integration. The company will work with Intel when it comes to server upgrades, he said.

After the upgrade, HP plans to offer clients different service package options related to NetWeaver. The services HP offers will integrate to allow customers to enter at any point in the life cycle, according to Treat. Those services include service enablement, design and implementation, application development and management.

HP also has plans to draw from new research stemming from a 10-year agreement between HP Labs and SAP.

"Adaptive infrastructure is one of our new things to come. Right now, customers have to put in place enough hardware capacity and infrastructure to support peak or quarter-end processes, and a lot of that (capacity) goes unused until peak times. This will bring solutions that will allow them to pay for what they use, and (it) can scale up to meet the demand," Treat said.

In addition to the new services, Treat said HP will soon be announcing business process consulting in conjunction with software and consulting company IDS Scheer.