It's not easy to streamline software implementations and significantly lower IT costs, especially as the pace of business change accelerates and margin for error gets tighter. As a result, IT organizations are facing these operational challenges:

• IT systems failure represents the greatest potential threat of all to the success of company operations, and for many organizations the sheer complexity of IT applications and system architectures is the primary source of risk exposure.¹
• For ERP applications, downtime can cost $6,400 to $7,900 per minute (PDF).²

SAP provides software and services that help improve operational efficiency, get the most out of your applications, and deliver continuous innovation without disruption. With these solutions, companies are:

• Optimizing IT operations and freeing up resources to focus on business differentiation
• Managing the life cycle of applications based on IT service management best practices
• Aligning business and IT priorities within and beyond the enterprise

Optimizing Operations and Managing Life Cycles for Efficiency

SAP Enterprise Support enables you to optimize solution operations with access to SAP Active Global Support. This support infrastructure provides organizations with SAP's knowledge hubs and supports integrated life-cycle management practices, incident management, service delivery, and software updates. The key elements of SAP Enterprise Support include:

• Solution operation standards
• Mission-critical support
• Quality management
• End-to-end solution operations

SAP and our partners also provide software that enables you to ensure the quality and performance of your solutions. For example, SAP Test Data Migration Server and SAP Quality Center by HP allow you to minimize the application deployment risk. SAP LoadRunner by HP also helps optimize the performance and scalability of processes running on SAP and non-SAP software. And with SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood, you can automate business processes to improve efficiency and reduce human error.

Furthermore, SAP services for system landscape consolidation and harmonization can help your team optimize SAP software infrastructures by defining a strategy, identifying software needs, and merging SAP production software efficiently across a complex environment.

Aligning Business and IT Priorities for Insight and Innovation

With complexity reduced, SAP can help you focus more resources on projects providing business value to your enterprise. SAP's experienced enterprise architects can assist you in integrating your business solutions with your management's vision. In addition, SAP Product Definition and SAP Resource and Portfolio Management can enable you to integrate IT initiatives with business goals and execute priorities during implementation.

Powered by SAP NetWeaver, SAP's integrated software and services can help you implement key IT strategies, run and optimize the business of IT, and integrate processes across your business network.

1 "Coming to Grips with IT Risk", A report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, 2007
2 "Maximizing DB2 Performance and Availability with BMC," Information Access Company, 2006.