Microsoft and its cloud rival Amazon made dueling announcements involving SAP and their respective cloud strategies, for innovations to people-centric applications development for SAP software as well as virtualization and cloud computing without disruption of customer IT landscapes. Microsoft’s SAP announcement is full of future plans, while Amazon is offering certain SAP wares via the Amazon Web Services platform……….
SAP AG and Microsoft have announced plans to better enable .NET developers to build applications for SAP environments, as well as new plans to improve integration between SAP software and Microsoft virtualization and cloud software. Microsoft’s broad partner ecosystem is what powers increased value and solutions for customers and their evolving business needs. As a result of this announcement, developers can expect much more support and integration between the development worlds of SAP and Microsoft. Business processes from SAP software can now be easily consumed and extended by .NET developers, simplifying the overall application development process. This level of access will immediately reduce the number of steps developers must take in order to ensure application integration, and also lead to shorter development cycles and lower costs.Microsoft and SAP also plan to provide integration between SAP’s landscape management software, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V technology, bringing greater agility to cloud management and deployments.
This integration will instill enhanced flexibility, scalability and management in the cloud, all while reducing cost and risk. Through these connected offerings, SAP and Microsoft customers will be able to easily scale their deployments in their own data centers or through private clouds, for example, if they have a workload that needs on-demand scale periodically, such as a paycheck or employee performance review application. Microsoft and SAP are committed to driving greater levels of innovation and flexibility for application development and cloud deployment – from your datacenter to the public cloud, eventually enabling hybrid computing scenarios via Windows Azure for companies to embrace cloud computing on their terms. The Microsoft announcement with SAP comes on the same day that SAP announced a partnership with AWS (Amazon Web Services) to run a healthy portion of SAP’s enterprise software applications in the cloud on the AWS platform. SAP and Amazon teamed to certify that SAP’s software will run on the AWS cloud. The first wave of supported SAP products on AWS includes the entire suite of SAP BusinessObjects solutions and SAP Rapid Deployment solutions supported on Linux platforms.
Microsoft’s announcement is more developer-focused and includes no enterprise software running on the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud. Instead, Microsoft officials speak of plans and eventualities for SAP apps running on Windows Azure. “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,” said Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board, Technology and Innovation, SAP. “Interoperability is a core advantage that SAP and Microsoft can deliver to the customers we both share.”SAP and Microsoft recently launched Duet Enterprise software, a joint product for SAP applications and Microsoft SharePoint development. Enhancing their support across a variety of application models and scenarios, SAP and Microsoft now plan to interconnect their development platforms, extending development capabilities for developers within the Microsoft ecosystem. This plan includes using software development accelerators to enable connectivity between the development platforms, integrating Microsoft development tools with the business functionality of SAP solutions across a variety of application models and scenarios. Microsoft and SAP‘s goal is to simplify access to SAP applications for millions of .NET developers using SAP NetWeaver Gateway technology, in a manner that does not require any specialized knowledge of SAP business software. Tighter integration will bring new innovations to the forefront, helping drive a plethora of new .NET applications that consume and extend SAP Business Suite applications.
The anticipated new interoperability layers include:
- Visual Studio integration: Microsoft and SAP will be partnering to dramatically increase developer productivity and lower cost through deeper integration of SAP systems and future versions of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework
- Windows Azure SDK for SAP NetWeaver Gateway: Extend SAP NetWeaver Gateway with a new software development kit (SDK) for Windows Azure so that .NET developers are able to create private or public cloud-based applications for Windows Azure that connect to on-premise SAP systems without leaving their existing development environment
Microsoft and SAP plan to create new interoperability between industry-leading SAP business technology and Microsoft’s virtualization and management portfolio across data centers, private clouds and public clouds. The companies plan to integrate upcoming landscape management software from SAP with Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center. This integration will instill enhanced flexibility, scalability and management in the cloud all while reducing cost and risk. Through these connected offerings, SAP and Microsoft customers will be able to scale deployments in their own data centers or through private clouds. In the future, SAP and Microsoft plan to continue their collaboration to support deployment of SAP applications on the Windows Azure Platform.
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