Microsoft Corp. and SAP AG on Wednesday announced a new offering that builds on the companies plans to more deeply integrate their technology, highlighted last year at SAPs developer conference.
Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft and Walldorf, Germany-based SAP announced a Portal Development Kit for Microsoft .Net (PDK for .Net) for building content for the SAP Enterprise portal, a component of the SAP NetWeaver platform, said Tim OBrien, senior product manager at Microsoft.
The PDK for .Net is an add-in for the Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003 development platform. The add-in is based on work that SAP initiated as part of its involvement in the Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program, OBrien said.
“So at the end of the day, developers can deploy portal components in the NetWeaver world,” OBrien said.
OBrien said there are more than 40,000 SAP installations running applications on the Windows platform.
Microsoft and SAP announced plans to further commit to integrating their development technology at the SAP Sapphire developer conference last May, OBrien said.
“Were wasting no time delivering on those commitments,” he said. “This [announcement] underscores the depth between SAP and .Net, and we want to continue to deepen our relationship with SAP.”
Also, in June last year, during Oracle Corp.s trial with the U.S. Department of Justice, evidence emerged that Microsoft had in fact considered acquiring SAP in late 2003.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Sybase Inc. last month announced that Sybase had joined the Microsoft VSIP program and was integrating the Sybase DataWindow .Net solution with Visual Studio .Net 2003.
Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis in programming environments and developer tools.