Online workspaces, support for SOA (service orientated architecture) management, a disaster recovery solution and real-time reporting for manufacturers are among “groundbreaking” projects coming from SAP.

Opened in June last year, with support from HP, Intel, NetApp and Cisco, the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto, California was conceived as a hands-on working environment for SAP, its customers and partners - and these, it says, are the first fruits.

Dietmar Giljohann, initiative manager at Procter & Gamble, says of the online collaboration workplace development, for example, that it is about providing the governance and layered access required for business communications.

“The collaboration workspace from SAP is a powerful, new tool and has brought an important additional dimension to Procter & Gamble’s engagement in SAP’s ecosystem,” he says.

How? By providing a Web 2.0 infrastructure, with blogs, wikis and online forums topped by built-in governance. That allows companies, such as system integrators, technology partners and independent software partners, to participate and collaborate in real time within a secure business network community.

SAP also says its collaboration workspace is already improving the efficiency of 13 different programmes within the organisation - bringing together more than 3,700 users from 275 companies, participating in more than 200 workspaces.

It’s a similar story with SAP’s project involving VMware and NetApp, aimed at simplifying disaster recovery. SAP makes the point that many manufacturers find that the formalised disaster recovery plans available today are expensive, time-intensive and difficult to implement.

Using VMware Site Recovery Manager and NetApp storage solutions, SAP says it can now provide automated disaster recovery testing procedures and the option of automated daily disaster recovery tests. The trio also claim recovery times improved from days to hours or minutes.