IBM announced it has been awarded two 2010 SAP Pinnacle Awards including Customer Satisfaction and Global Technology Partner of the Year. Winners were selected based on more than 230 nominations in 27 categories received from partners and SAP employees. With a record total of 20 awards, IBM has received SAP Pinnacle Awards every year since its inception. The awards were presented at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP's international customer conference held in Orlando, Fla. May 16–19.

The Customer Satisfaction Award goes to partners with the highest ratings from quarterly SAP customer satisfaction surveys. 2010 is the second consecutive year IBM has received this prestigious award. John Leffler, SAP Global and Americas Leader, IBM Global Business Services, said, "IBM continues to be recognized by SAP clients as excelling in customer satisfaction. With more than 9,000 SAP services customers globally, we are committed to providing the best and most comprehensive solutions, service and support in the industry."  

Receiving the Global Technology Partner of the Year Award can be attributed to IBM's leading DB2 database software and Power Systems technologies. Joint development between IBM and SAP has resulted in helping hundreds of customers transform their business. Over the past nine months, this has further been exemplified with more than 100 businesses switching from Oracle to DB2 to run their SAP applications.  IBM's optimized systems for SAP workloads continues to lead various benchmarks which allows IBM to offer customers industry leading solutions including Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) and the Retail Trilogy project--a joint IBM and SAP initiative to address time-critical and scalability concerns for retailers.

Customers particularly benefit from the wide-range and deep integration of IBM's infrastructure portfolio that support SAP applications. The portfolio includes DB2, WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli and Rational software, as well as IBM System z, System p, System x, Power Systems, BladeCenter and Storage servers.