SAP is the world's leading provider of business software solutions. Today, more than 26,150 customers in over 120 countries run more than 88,700 installations of SAP^® software -- from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small and midsize businesses to enterprise-scale suite solutions for global organizations. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver^™ platform to drive innovation and enable business change, mySAP^™ Business Suite solutions are helping enterprises around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. SAP industry solutions support the unique business processes of more than 25 industry segments, including high tech, retail, public sector and financial services. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol SAP. For more information, please visit the SAP web site at www.sap.com.

In collaboration with SAP and SAP customers, F5 Networks has created a solution that delivers security, high availability, and improved performance for SAP web and portal technologies. For example, by deploying F5 Networks' BIG-IP product with SAP Portal, enterprises extend their control over their network and application traffic. The BIG-IP device enables organizations to increase SAP application reliability by providing high availability through its advanced health checking capabilities. It also allows organizations to quickly scale their SAP solutions using the BIG-IP product's advanced load balancing algorithms to meet growing application demands. Additionally, organizations can improve the performance of SAP Portal with WebAccelerator, which is an advanced web application delivery solution that provides a series of intelligent technologies designed to overcome problems with browsers, web application platforms and WAN latency issues which impact user performance.

F5 is also a charter member of SAP's Enterprise Services Community (ESC) and a founding member of SAP's Network Advisory Group within the ESC. The BIG-IP LTM version 9 with WebAccelerator, BIG-IP LTM v9 with Application Security Manager, WANJet version 5, and the FirePass SSL VPN Controller version 6 have achieved SAP Certified Integration for third-party networking appliances that interoperate with SAP solutions using the SAP NetWeaver platform and an enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA).

Finally, SAP uses F5's FirePass controller for secure remote access to their internal network. The FirePass device allowed SAP to overcome the limitations and complexity of their previous VPN solution, and provide secure remote access to their employees from any location, using any type of device. Nearly 7,000 SAP employees access applications through the FirePass device every day. And since deploying the FirePass controller, the number of VPN related support issues has decreased by 50%.