It is that time of year again. SAP Sapphire is just around the corner and thousands of CIO's,Line of Business Managers,Basis Consultants,and Application Architects will be heading to Orlando to see what is new and up the sleeves of SAP.

Cisco will again have a major presence at this years event. In addition to being an Onyx sponsor,Cisco will have five speaking sessions all centered around use cases with customers.Johnsonville Sausage,Cisco,TransCanada Pipeline, andan oil and gas giant will all explain why they chose to install SAP HANA and what operational efficiencies they have realized as a result of their decision. This will all be capped off by a major theater session involving ebay and Cognilytics, and Cisco explaining the reason ebay chose to install SAP HANA on Cisco UCS and what it means to them as a company.

In addition to the major speaking sessions at Sapphire, Cisco will also offer customer the opportunity to hear from and see the solutions from many of their partners with presentations in the Cisco booth, during the event. Customers will hear fromDeloitte, Virtustream, WiPro, SAP, ProMorphics,Freudenberg IT, EMC, and NetAppjust to name a few.

Two of the newest innovations that is setting Cisco apart from the rest of the world is theInternet of Things andApplication Centric Infrastructureor ACI. Don't miss these demos on our booth (Booth#230 ). It's going to be awesome and quite surprising !

Sapphire also plans to be an interesting event from a hardware certification perspective. With the release of the newest Intel chip set, most of the SAP hardware partners are again going through the certification process for SAP HANA. Customers will be the beneficiaries of faster processing speeds and larger amounts of memory for their in-memory processing.

Cloud, Cloud, Cloud. This is the battle cry of SAP this year. Since Cisco is the#1 cloud provider in the world, and because of the ever tightening relationship with SAP, Cisco is poised to offer SAP customers a number of options with their cloud decisions. So as SAP moves to the software and licensing to the cloud, Cisco will move with them offering solutions to benefit and enhance the SAP customers' experience.

All in all, Sapphire looks to be another year of innovation. Come by the Cisco booth#230 to be part of the future of SAP and Cisco. You can also download the latest IDC white paper to see why Cisco UCS is quickly becoming the server platform of choice for SAP HANA. See you in Orlando

http://www.slideshare.net/Ciscodatacenter/idc-white-paper-sap-on-ucs