SAP, a flagship Citrix customer, expects to save 35 percent in terminal server costs by combining with the XenApp application through better management functionality.

The announcement is a big win for Citrix, whose entrance into the virtualisation market with the in late 2007 has been largely overshadowed by the dominance of market leader VMware.

According to Citrix, SAP was looking to consolidate its server infrastructure and wanted to create a "much more flexible and dynamic computing architecture".

Following an "extensive test" of XenServer, the company will proceed with a multi-stage roll-out of the server virtualisation solution onto 500 servers, initially at its Saint Leon Rot office in Germany.

In the next phase of the project, the servers in the worldwide training centers will be virtualised, followed by the project management division with several hundred development, test, and support systems.