The SAP world is entering a new era. Over the next few years, most enterprise resource planning (ERP) users will begin to move beyond application-by-application deployment of SAP ERP 6.0 solutions to large-scale migrations of core enterprise systems. If experience is any guide, the lifecycle of these systems will be from 10 to 15 years. The next round of decisions about SAP deployment will be among the most important today’s executives will make.
This report compares costs and benefits for large-scale deployment of SAP ERP 6.0 solutions on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and IBM DB2 9.
One conclusion is particularly striking. SQL Server 2005 is often perceived as a “low-cost” database. For relatively small deployments, this may be the case. But for large-scale ERP 6.0 installations experiencing sustained data growth, the picture is very different.
Over a five-year period, the examples presented in this report show that combined costs of databases, storage, servers, and personnel required to support SQL Server 2005-based ERP 6.0 environments are almost double those for DB2 9. Organizations that migrate from SQL Server 2005 to DB2 9 may reduce these costs by 46 percent.
