SAP eases Azure and .NET development

SAP has announced plans to interconnect its software with Microsoft's development platforms, making it easier for .NET and Azure developers to build applications that feed into SAP's fleet of business intelligence programs.

The collaboration, announced on Wednesday at SAP's Sapphire Now conference in Orlando, Florida, sees the companies tighten a historical collaboration. The goal of the two firms is to make it easier for .NET developers to access SAP applications without needing a fine-grained understanding of the programs.

"Building on the successful partnership with Duet Enterprise, 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," Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP's executive board for technology and innovation, said in a statement. "Interoperability is a core advantage that SAP and Microsoft can deliver to the customers we both share."

The Duet Enterprise announcement in February saw the companies provide integration and coherence between SharePoint 2010 and SAP's enterprise resource planning (ERP) products, recasting a partnership dating from 2005 that had originally focused on a broader stable of Microsoft products.

SAP expects the new interoperability layers to offer tight integration between SAP systems, and forthcoming versions of Microsoft's Visual Studio developer environment and the .NET framework.

Additionally, SAP's NetWeaver Gateway, which is a connector between their products and non-SAP products, will gain a software development kit for Microsoft's cloud platform Windows Azure. This will allow developers to connect through to on-premise SAP systems using the .NET framework in conjunction with the Azure cloud.

In the future, the companies plan integration between SAP's management software platforms and Microsoft System Centre and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V.