X
Business

SAP says it will support .Net but analysts ask why

NEW YORK, Oct 30 (Reuters) - German software giant SAP AG said it would back both Microsoft's .Net Internet strategy and rival Sun Microsystems Inc's.
Written by Siobhan Kennedy, Contributor

NEW YORK, Oct 30 (Reuters) - German software giant SAP AG said it would back both Microsoft's .Net Internet strategy and rival Sun Microsystems Inc's. Java technology, rebutting reports on Tuesday that had SAP jilting Microsoft.

"There is no distinguishing between the two," SAP spokesperson Bill Wohl said in a telephone interview of his company's embrace of both Microsoft and Sun technologies. Wohl, who was responding to an article in the Financial Times which said that SAP was about to drop support for .Net in favor of Sun's latest Java standard--reiterated SAP's intention for its software and systems to be open and compatible with all of its competitors, not just one or two.

"The very meaning of "openness" is that we are not going to do anything in the way we support our customers that will limit their choices about technology standards and technology strategies," Wohl said.

But analysts questioned how strong SAP's commitment was to Microsoft. SAP has little incentive to support Microsoft, since .Net--Microsoft's way of connecting all manner of software and services to the Web--is still in its infancy, one said.

"Today, if you're going to run your multibillion dollar enterprise, most people are going to run them on (Java), not .Net," Lance Travis, a senior analyst with software industry research firm AMR Research said.

By contrast, Java is an established programming language which has been endorsed by the majority of SAP's main competitors, including Oracle Corp. and PeopleSoft Inc.. SAP is focused on the latest version of Java software for big businesses known as "J2EE."

"It would not surprise me at all if they never supported .Net," Travis said.

Java lets SAP work with other sofware
Up until now, SAP has used its own proprietary programming language, BAPI, which has its roots in decades of in-house SAP software development, to write its software applications.

But that's meant that SAP customers have been tied to using SAP's own underlying application server technology -- which runs SAP applications--instead of buying software application servers from other companies such as International Business Machines Corp. and BEA Systems Inc..

The beauty of these rival application servers is that are compatible with J2EE, analysts said, which means they work with the Java programming language from Sun Microsystems Inc. . Java is designed as a language to enable developers to write their software applications once, and run them on any Java-compatible application computer.

SAP has always said it would work to develop a Java application server so that its customers wouldn't have to buy multiple brands of server software to run their business applications. Last year, SAP set up a separate subsidiary, called In-Q-My, to develop its own Java server, but to date, the technology has not been made available to customers.

The unveiling of its next generation application server technology--or support other Java application servers--could be at the heart of SAP's TechEd conference for outside software developers in Los Angeles next week.

But SAP insisted that there would be no announcement next week about dropping support for .Net. Instead, the company will show how its basic information infrastructure technology, including application servers, will allow its customers to "use their systems to interact...with internal and external systems inside their four walls and across the Web," Wohl said.

Copyright 2001, Reuters News Service


Editorial standards