by Antony AdsheadIBM and SAP have formed a far-reaching alliance.
The tie-up will see IBM delivering SAP software as a hosting
partner and the German enterprise resource management giant
supporting IBM's Websphere e-business platform.
The announcement came at SAP's Sapphire 2001 event in Orlando,
Florida. The conference also saw IBM announce an alliance with Palm
to extend mySAP.com to mobile users.
The deals underline SAP chief Hasso Plattner's affirmation of the
company's new, open approach. He said the company, which has been
heavily criticised for its closed ethos in the past, had realised
that working with other suppliers created far more opportunities
than going it alone.
Prior to the IBM agreement, SAP was said to be developing its own
e-business application server. Although the company has not
officially announced that it has abandoned this project, it would
seem likely that this will be dropped in favour of Websphere.
Under the alliance, SAP named IBM as a global technology partner
for its mySAP.com group of Internet-based enterprise software
applications. IBM will also become a SAP global service partner and
will offer application management services for SAP software as a
hosting partner.
The two companies have been working together on SAP's R/3 software
suite, which predates the Internet-enabled my.SAP.com. Last year,
$2bn (£1.4bn) of IBM's hardware, software and services income was
derived from SAP-related business.
Under the deal, SAP will support IBM's Websphere e-business
platform, which recently adopted the UDDI and Soap protocols. These
are widely seen as providing a means to make B2B transactions more
efficient.
SAP said that the IBM deal would not be an exclusive arrangement
and that it would support whatever software its customers required.
This will be seen as a boost for IBM, which is keen to be seen as a
platform provider that knits together disparate enterprise
applications.
IBM will train half of its 5,000 SAP consultants on mySAP.com
software. This is regarded by industry watchers as a vote of
confidence in mySAP.com.
Sapphire 2001 reiterated the message transmitted at the company's
Lisbon event in April, which oriented SAP's software output around
Web portalisation and the use of B2B exchanges.
In a separate development, SAP announced that Compaq has selected
the mySAP Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) suite as its
collaborative design and engineering technology. Compaq's
implementation will involve more than 10,000 Compaq employees and
partners around the world, creating the largest mySAP PLM programme
to date.