A recent case study gives us a closer look at some big name cloud computing vendors, including VMware and Intel.  It’s available at Business Solutions details Nashville, Tennessee-based Southwestern /Great American’s utilization of WMware and Intel technology to set-up a platform for SAP ERP deployment.  The highlights are detailed below:

“By virtualizing, we saved ourselves a lot of money by not having to replace outdated legacy servers, and we could consolidate our storage,” Solima says.“Our investment was roughly $560K for a three-year lease and maintenance contracts, and the estimated savings over three years was $218K.”

Southwestern/Great American transited from a legacy IBM AS/400 duel environment to VMware ESX-running IBM blade servers with Intel Xeon processors, which support both SAP ERP and Windows-based applications. Added flexibility and evidently cost-efficiency were the motives behind the transition, which was described as seamless from a user-end perspective. The cloud-based system reportedly also enables more efficient maintenance, reduced power consumption and more.

In other VMware developments, the virtualization solutions provider had recently revealed some important data on its Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition and the company’s plans for Hypervisor, which we covered more extensively here.

VMware is not the only one planning to stay ahead of the market and competition. Intel is heavily investing in the cloud trio-coalition between  Microsoft, NEC and itself in order to further expand its offerings portfolio. The chipmaker also seeks stability amidst the lack of demand in chipsets, planning to make its second generation mobile chips widespread among top vendors in second half of 2011.