Interoperability the motive behind new SAP/Microsoft joint effort

Monday, May 23, 2011

Enabling German business software company SAP's products to work hand-in-hand with those of Microsoft is the goal of a new and extensive integration project between the two companies.

Additionally, both companies said, a secondary aim is to optimize the ability of customers to leverage cloud services to the fullest, providing improved flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

SAP board member Vishal Sikka said that the project is an expansion of existing partnerships with Microsoft.

"SAP and Microsoft plan to offer interoperability and a native development experience, so that a .NET developer can easily build applications in visual studio that run across the SAP and Microsoft platforms," he said in a statement.

Some new SAP landscape management products will be integrated with Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center frameworks from Microsoft to allow businesses to build their own cloud services from scratch, SAP said.

Given the high-profile and widespread influence of both companies in the world of business software, this expanded collaboration is a potentially significant development for cloud computing technology at the enterprise level, experts say.